aftereffects-plugin-bundle

Conda build recipe for a bundle of After Effects plugins

About

This package build recipe creates a conda package that bundles together all the After Effects plugins you provide in an input folder. Note that if your plugins require network licenses, you will have to handle that separately.

How the Plugin Bundle Works

This recipe takes all the .aex plugin files you place in the archive_files/aftereffects-plugin-bundle/win-64/ directory and packages them into a single conda package. When this package is installed in a conda environment (like on SMF or CMF render nodes), it automatically copies all the .aex files into the %PREFIX%\aftereffects\Plug-ins directory where After Effects expects to find them.

You collect your plugin files locally (typically from C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <version>\Support Files\Plug-ins), then the conda build process bundles them together. When the package is installed on render farm nodes alongside the After Effects conda package, all your custom plugins become immediately available without any manual setup on each machine.

To understand how After Effects plugins work in a conda package, see the instructions for plugin packages in the After Effects recipe README.

Building the package for Windows

First copy all the Windows .aex plugin files that you want to include into the conda_recipes/archive_files/aftereffects-plugin-bundle/win-64 directory. You can find the plugins you're using locally in the After Effects installation directory like C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <version>\Support Files\Plug-ins.

Build the package locally

To build locally on Windows, you can follow the linked installation instructions for either rattler-build or conda-build.

IMPORTANT: Conda packages have a build number that you need to update to a new number each time you build and publish the package for the same version number. Edit the meta.yaml and recipe.yaml files in the build section from number: 0 to a bigger number each time you follow these instructions.

From the conda_recipes directory, run one of the following build commands:

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>rattler-build build -r aftereffects-plugin-bundle/recipe

 ╭─ Finding outputs from recipe
 │ Found 1 variants
 ...
 ╭─ Build summary
 │
 │ ╭─ Build summary for recipe: aftereffects-plugin-bundle-1.0-h9490d1a_1
 │ │ Artifact: C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes\output\win-64\aftereffects-plugin-bundle-1.0-h9490d1a_1.conda (253.17 KiB)
 │ │ Variant configuration (hash: h9490d1a_1):
 │ │ ╭─────────────────┬──────────╮
 │ │ │ target_platform ┆ "win-64" │
 │ │ ╰─────────────────┴──────────╯
 │ │
 │ │ Run dependencies:
 │ │ ╭──────────────────┬──────────╮
 │ │ │ Name             ┆ Spec     │
 │ │ ╞══════════════════╪══════════╡
 │ │ │ Run dependencies ┆          │
 │ │ │ aftereffects     ┆ >=25,<26 │
 │ │ ╰──────────────────┴──────────╯
 │ │
 │ │
 │ ╰─────────────────── (took 0 seconds)
 │
 ╰─────────────────── (took 0 seconds)

or

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>conda build aftereffects-plugin-bundle/recipe --no-test
Adding in variants from internal_defaults
...
####################################################################################
Source and build intermediates have been left in C:\...\conda-bld.
There are currently 1 accumulated.
To remove them, you can run the ```conda build purge``` command

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>dir C:\...\conda-bld\win-64
...
04/10/2025  02:21 PM           232,806 aftereffects-plugin-bundle-1.0-0.conda
...

Publish the locally built package to an S3 conda channel

To publish your package to an S3 conda channel, two things need to happen:

1. Copy the Windows package into the win-64 subdirectory of the channel.
2. Update the channel index (repodata.json and some other files) so that they include metadata about the new package.

You can accomplish this with the AWS CLI to synchronize S3 data and the conda index command that is available when you install conda-build.

Here's an example of doing this for the package that was built by rattler-build:

1. Synchronize the win-64 subdirectory of the channel locally.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>set CHANNEL_BUCKET=<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>
   
   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>aws s3 sync s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/win-64 ./temp-local-channel/win-64
   ...
   

2. Copy the package you built into the win-64 subdirectory.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>copy output\win-64\aftereffects-plugin-bundle-1.0-h9490d1a_0.conda temp-local-channel\win-64
           1 file(s) copied.
   ...
   

3. Update the channel index with the new package.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>conda index --subdir win-64 --zst ./temp-local-channel
   Indexing ['win-64'] does not include 'noarch'
   ...
   

4. Synchronize the local copy of the win-64 subdirectory back to S3.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>aws s3 sync ./temp-local-channel/win-64 s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/win-64
   upload: temp-local-channel\win-64\repodata.json to s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default/win-64/repodata.json
   ...
   

Build the package on Deadline Cloud

If you create a package build queue as described in the Deadline Cloud developer guide page Create a conda channel using S3, you can submit the package to build on your farm.

Note that this approach automatically determines a new build number each time you run the package build job, you do not have to handle that yourself like when building locally.

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>submit-package-job aftereffects-plugin-bundle
No channel URL was provided, using a default prefix on the queue's job attachments bucket
Building packages into channel s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default
...