21.5 Adding custom plugins to the Plugins menu in Geneious Prime

Administrators can add custom, in-house plugins to the Plugins menu in Geneious Prime, and restrict access to publicly available plugins by doing the following:

1. Set up an XML file that contains information for each plugin you want to add, including its name, description, version information, and a URL from which Geneious can download it. For an example of the format to use, see https://desktop-links.geneious.com/assets/plugins/DownloadablePlugins.xml
2. Go to Tools → Preferences → General, and click “Advanced…”. Look for the advanced preference CustomPluginXmlUrl. Select it, click Edit and enter the address of the XML file you created. This can be a link to a web server hosting the XML file, or can be a link to a file in the format file://<host>/path/to/file, which is installed at a known accessible location on local or shared disk. You must restart Geneious to apply the changes.

Geneious uses the contents of the XML file to add the custom plugins to the Plugins menu in Geneious. All available plugins from Biomatters will still be displayed, along with the additional plugins from the custom XML file. The xml file is also used to determine when to notify the user that a new version of a plugin is available to download.

If you wish to turn off access to the Biomatters-provided plugins, so that only the custom plugins are visible, use the Advanced Preference DisableCheckForBiomattersPluginUpdates and change this to “true”, then restart Geneious. If you wish to restrict network access to the outside or control which Biomatters-provided plugins are available, you can locally mirror the Biomatters plugins you want to provide, and use a custom XML file to specify the details.