Loading External Plugins

[eforkin]

I'm having some trouble loading in a non-builtin external plugin as part of an IF manifest file. Using this electricity maps plugin as an example (although I have the same issue with any other external plugin), I've attempted to run their example manifest file and consistently get the following error:

PluginInitializationError: Provided module if-electricitymaps is invalid or not found. Error: Cannot find module 'if-electricitymaps'

How can I properly load this? I've attempted to run "npm install https://github.com/electricitymaps/if-electricitymaps" based on this doc and have additionally attempted to set the path just to "if-electricitymaps" instead of the github url to reference the node_module directly (based on a doc that I can no longer find :) ), but all to no avail so far.

[jbdietrich]

@eforkin thanks for raising this. I helped develop the if-electricitymaps plugin. From what I understand from reading the IF code, it doesn't actually fetch external package plugins, it just uses the identifier in the URL to determine which package to attempt to import locally.

It seems to work best if the plugin is installed alongside IF (e.g. if you install IF globally, also install the plugin globally). But maybe there could be clearer instructions here.