Plugin Hot-Reload by Cleaning sys.modules?

Archive Python API
13

My caveman solution: Restart Blender and recover the session.
I put this in an operator and bound it to F5, so I can restart Blender quickly with one button press.

Of course you lose all addon state that’s not saved in properties, but for me it achieves the goal to continue from where I was with updated addon code. E.g. reproduce a bug, fix it, press F5 to load the new code, test again to confirm the fix is working.

You can find the code here: https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendLuxCore/blob/d435660c798451c0de3f023d07b0721ddbeccdf5/operators/debug.py#L23

class LUXCORE_OT_debug_restart(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "luxcore.debug_restart"
    bl_label = "LuxCore Debug Restart"
    bl_description = "Restart Blender and recover session"

    def execute(self, context):
        blender_exe = bpy.app.binary_path
        import subprocess
        subprocess.Popen([blender_exe, "-con", "--python-expr", "import bpy; bpy.ops.wm.recover_last_session()"])
        bpy.ops.wm.quit_blender()
        return {"FINISHED"}
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