mm-salvodragotta / dynahub

Dynamo Extension to interact with GitHub. Enable Dynamo to pull graphs from GitHub + version control

DynaHub

DynaHub is a Dynamo extension that facilitates the interaction between Dynamo and GitHub.

DynaHub is still in its alpha version.
So, for the purposes of managing expectations, please be mindful that this is a proof of concept. Any contribution to the development of this idea will be well received.

News: 16/08/2019

DynaHub now allows you to structure the folders in your repo in the way you prefer. Differently from the previous release, you can now have a folder structure as complex as you wish. This will be correctly (hopefully) shown in the browser's window!

Table of contents

• An Octocat plays Meccano
• Talk techy to me
• Current limitations
• Future features
• How to install

An Octocat plays Meccano

At Ridley/Willow we recognised the need to store all our Dynamo graphs in a centralised, cloud-based, safe place. Even better if it was possible to track changes to those graphs, thus avoiding unwanted modification. So, yeah, GitHub sounded like the perfect solution!

Also, going on github, finding your file, downloading it, opening Revit, opening Dynamo, opening the .dyn file, etc. sounded a bit cumbersome and time consuming.

But, fear no more. Dynamo allows extensions now. So we came up with DynaHub, a way to connect to your GitHub account and grab the graphs stored there, but without leaving Dynamo!

At the moment, DynaHub enables you to login to your GitHub account

And then you can browse what's in your repo and open the online-stored graph

Finally, did it ever happen to you too that you make a graph for someone to use and they get back to you saying "Doesn't work! It's broken!! Everything's red and yellow!" and you realise it's just they don't have the right packages?
Load your zipped packages (they HAVE TO be zipped to work...but this makes it much faster anyway) in a folder called packages to allow everyone to download the right packages with the Get Packages feature

Talk techy to me

• For now, browsing is only working on a simple (*) repo structure, download the .dyn file requested by the user in a temp folder created within Dynamo folders and then open it in Dynamo.

• When the user is done using the graph, the only thing to do is going to be to close Dynamo. When closing Dynamo, the temp folder created by DynaHub will be deleted with all the files inside.

• DynaHub uses OctoKit, a NuGet package developed by GitHub for an easier usage within the .NET framework.

• Getting the packages could be tricky. You cannot delete or add folders that are used by a program, so you will have to close Dynamo to make the changes of installing/uninstalling effective. To simplify your life, DynaHub will close Dynamo for you, but then you'll have to restart it yourself. In case you're using Dynamo on Revit, you'll have to restart Revit too.

Future features

• Search bar for quicker lookup of files
• Integrate GitHub Issues (for better communication and and graph requests)
• Forking repos
• Pull requests

We are also happy to hear your suggestions / feature requests!
Please feel free to shoot an email to [email protected] or log an issue on the repository.

How to install

There are two ways for installing DynaHub:

1. Build the solution and copy the folder to %AppData%Roaming\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2.0\packages to install for the Dynamo Sandbox (stand-alone version) or to %AppData%Roaming\Dynamo\Dynamo Revit\2.0\packages to install for the Revit plugin;

2. Open Dynamo (from Revit or the stand-alone Sandbox), go to the Dynamo Package Manager and look for DynaHub