Install Extensions With Ease

Posted by Jim Gay on Tuesday, September 09, 2008 | |

Sean Cribbs created an outstanding feature for the latest Radiant (0.6.9). You can now install extensions from the command line:

script/extension install gallery

By default, that script will look at the Radiant Extension Registry to try to find the specified extension. When it is found, the extension will be checked out or downloaded (whichever is appropriate) and it’s migrate and update tasks will be run.

To get some details about what you can do, run:

script/extension help

Not to be confused with this (which I also recommend):

script/extension install help

And to find details about an extension you may run:

PC:radiant you$ script/extension info comments
Name:           comments
Description:
  Adds blog-like comment functionality to Radiant. 
Author:         Ryan Heneise <ryan@artofmission.com>
Source code:    git://github.com/artofmission/radiant-comments.git
Download:       
Install type:   Git

I encourage all extension developers to register at the Radiant Extension Registry to make it even easier for users to find and install your well-written, well-tested and perfect-addition-to-Radiant extensions.

If you haven’t upgraded yet (or even if you have), take a look at John Muhl’s Ray which provides similar functionality through rake tasks to older (and current) versions of Radiant.

One small note for users upgrading from older versions: a minor typo prevents the extension script from being added to your Radiant instance when you run rake radiant:update. To fix this, you could create a new instance of radiant and copy the script over, or freeze to edge to use the command. See this commit for details on the required change.