Plugins

Plugins are features that extend Manim’s core functionality. Since Manim is extensible and not everything belongs in its core, we’ll go over how to install, use, and create your own plugins.

Note

The standard naming convention for plugins is to prefix the plugin with manim-. This makes them easy for users to find on package repositories such as PyPI.

Warning

The plugin feature is new and under active development. Expect updates for the best practices on installing, using, and creating plugins; as well as new subcommands/flags for manim plugins

Tip

See https://plugins.manim.community/ for the list of plugins available.

Installing Plugins

Plugins can be easily installed via the pip command:

pip install manim-*

After installing a plugin, you may use the manim plugins command to list your available plugins, see the following help output:

manim plugins -h
Usage: manim plugins [OPTIONS]

  Manages Manim plugins.

Options:
-l, --list  List available plugins
-h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Made with <3 by Manim Community developers.

You can list plugins as such:

manim plugins -l
Plugins:
• manim_plugintemplate

Using Plugins in Projects

For enabling a plugin manim.cfg or command line parameters should be used.

Important

The plugins should be module name of the plugin and not PyPi name.

Enabling plugins through manim.cfg

[CLI]
plugins = manim_rubikscube

For specifying multiple plugins, comma-separated values must be used.

[CLI]
plugins = manim_rubikscube, manim_plugintemplate

Creating Plugins

Plugins are intended to extend Manim’s core functionality. If you aren’t sure whether a feature should be included in Manim’s core, feel free to ask over on the Discord server. Visit manim-plugintemplate on PyPI.org which serves as an in-depth tutorial for creating plugins.

pip install manim-plugintemplate

The only requirement of manim plugins is that they specify an entry point with the group, "manim.plugins". This allows Manim to discover plugins available in the user’s environment. Everything regarding the plugin’s directory structure, build system, and naming are completely up to your discretion as an author. The aforementioned template plugin is only a model using Poetry since this is the build system Manim uses. The plugin’s entry point can be specified in poetry as:

[tool.poetry.plugins."manim.plugins"]
"name" = "object_reference"

Here name is the name of the module of the plugin.

Here object_reference can point to either a function in a module or a module itself. For example,

[tool.poetry.plugins."manim.plugins"]
"manim_plugintemplate" = "manim_plugintemplate"

Here a module is used as object_reference, and when this plugin is enabled, Manim will look for __all__ keyword defined in manim_plugintemplate and everything as a global variable one by one.

If object_reference is a function, Manim calls the function and expects the function to return a list of modules or functions that need to be defined globally.

For example,

[tool.poetry.plugins."manim.plugins"]
"manim_plugintemplate" = "manim_awesomeplugin.imports:setup_things"

Here, Manim will call the function setup_things defined in manim_awesomeplugin.imports and calls that. It returns a list of function or modules which will be imported globally.

A note on Renderer Compatibility

Depending on which renderer is currently active, custom mobjects created in your plugin might want to behave differently as the corresponding mobject base classes are (unfortunately) not fully compatible.

The currently active renderer can be queried by checking the value of manim.config.renderer. All possible renderer types are given by constants.RendererType. The module manim.mobject.utils contains utility functions that return the base class for the currently active renderer.

A simple form of renderer compatibility (by hot-swapping the class inheritance chain) for Mobjects directly inheriting from Mobject or VMobject can be achieved by using the mobject.opengl.opengl_compatibility.ConvertToOpenGL metaclass.