Hi, I thought I would share my simple method for downloading A Nightly Build of Blender. Then Turning it into a standalone that uses it’s own directory. Then adding in all the addons you have collected/bought/written in their own folder.
I need to use new builds every few days, It’s such a pain to install addons as my nightly build turnaround is so fast.
I grab a Build from here: https://builder.blender.org/download/
I unzip it to the desktop or more usually just use the downloads folder…
After it’s unpacked, open the folder to examine the contents.
We are looking for the 2.80 folder as the tasks are done there.
Inside the 2.80 folder, I then create a folder called config. This folder tells Blender to save it’s preferences inside it. It will only ever save/read preferences from it’s own config folder
Then open the scripts folder and open the modules folder.
In the modules folder, open the addons_utils.py
At line 53 add
addon_paths += _bpy.utils.script_paths("addons_extern")
Save the file.
Back in the scripts folder, you’ll see addons and addons_contrib folders, add another called addons_extern. Your now ready to fill the addons_extern folder with as many addons as you like.
Once you have done this a few times, it’s very quick and easy. First manually edit the addons_utils.py file in case it’s changed/updated in the new build. You can then copy the config and addons_extern folders from the previous build/into the next and continue on happily with all the addons you use and your settings. When I receive updates for addons, I simply replace the addon with the new one in the addons_extern folder. I’ve found it great for using nightly builds and transferring settings/addons and keeping all my collected/bought/written addons in the one place.
I hope you can find this useful.