Easier Plugin Development Workflow

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to develop and quickly test plugins.

In the past, we could use things like HotSwap, but that no longer works (Edit: It might work again once a Roblox bug is fixed). Currently, the best way to test is to right-click the plugin code, click Save As Local Plugin, then save the file. Assuming the file already exists, you will be prompted to overwrite the existing one. It takes four clicks to push a local plugin change. While this might not sound like a lot, it’s an annoying hassle when you’re trying to quickly test changes.

Addressing this issue would greatly improve the speed at which plugin development could occur.


Possible idea:

Built-in Hot Reloading
Create a Studio tool that allows a selected asset to automatically reload as a local plugin when a certain context menu is selected. (e.g. right-click > run as development plugin). It’s not necessarily “hot” if you have to click a button, but it’s better than going through 4 clicks.

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Was HotSwap still working before this bug, which will be fixed?

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I’m not sure! Tried to use it the other day for the first time in many months. Seems consistent with the problem though: It causes Studio to hang.

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HotSwap doesn’t work in the case you are debugging some util plugin that runs in Play Solo since it uses loadstring. Maybe in Team Create as well since it’s a client. You can hack around this though by creating a module and setting its source to:

< script source >
return nil

:sunglasses:

Have not run into any issues using this in a similar plugin:

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As a temporary workaround, I’ve updated HotSwap to fix the freezing problem. More generally, it could use a rewrite, which I’ll get around to.

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