Alternate plugin repositories broken?

I’ve added an entry to “Alternate plugin repositories”,

http://gitserver.foo.example.com/glyphs/control/plugins.plist

but the HTTP server never gets a request for this file, neither when Glyphs starts, nor when the Plugin Manager is opened.

It used to work with a different server about a year ago. Is it broken at the moment?

Works for me. Try adding the following line:

https://formkunft.com/glyphs/packages-preview-mastermenu.plist

Does a plugin named MasterMenu show up in your Plugin Manger?

Your URL works for me. Does the plist file need to have a specific MIME type? Mine is just served as plaintext.

I don’t think your MIME type could cause such an issue. Can you share the URL, maybe privately as a private message?

Sorry, I can’t share it, the repo is on a local network. But I suspect that it may only work via https? When I change your URL to use http, your plugin also doesn’t show up in the Plugin Manager.

Indeed, I have set up HTTPS on my server, and now the plugins show up.

Next problem, apparently Glyphs can’t clone via a git+ssh:// URL …

Failed to clone repository from
git+ssh://gitserver.example.com:/home/git/glyphs/voodoo.git
to
~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs 3/Repositories/voodoo.git

Git cloning works from the command line. Maybe I should just put the repos on GitHub like you described in Using Private and Local Plugin Repositories - #20 by FlorianPircher

I have had issues with the new GitHub tokens, so for now, I think I would recommend against using them. Glyphs is using libgit2 for its Git-handling, including cloning. Check which protocols libgit2 likes, maybe HTTP (no S) is not supported, and maybe there is a way to make git: or ssh: work with libgit2.

For your needs, would it be enough to have a distribution method not involving Git? So, a way where Glyphs would download a zip file whenever it updated so similar? Just for planning future ideas …

macOS doesn’t allow any connections over http (no s) any more.

That’s an interesting idea. On the same local server, I also have a Python package index, which is a very simple folder structure.

.
├── bar
│   └── bar-0.1.tar.gz
└── foo
    ├── Foo-1.0.tar.gz
    └── Foo-2.0.tar.gz

You point pip to this additional package index by passing the --extra-index-url option, or setting it in pip’s configuration file. The pip command will deduce the package name and version from the folder and file names.

Maybe this would be a good thing for Glyphs to adopt?