Embedding GPlugin

You can embed GPlugin into any language that has GObject-Introspection support, but in this example we’re going to look at embedding GPlugin into a C based project.

GPlugin was designed to be simple to implement and use. Initialization and teardown examples can be found below.

Initialization

During the start up of your application you need to add the following

/* Create a variable to hold the default manager instance. */
GPluginManager *manager = NULL;

/* Initialize the GPlugin library */
gplugin_init();

/* Get a pointer to the default GPluginManager instance. */
manager = gplugin_manager_get_default();

/* Tell GPlugin to look for plugins in its default paths */
gplugin_manager_add_default_paths(manager);

/* Optionally tell GPlugin to look for plugins in application specific
 * paths.  This will add `$PREFIX/lib/application`.
 */
gplugin_manager_add_app_paths(manager, PREFIX, "application");

/* Once you're ready to find/load plugins call g_plugin_manager_refresh. */
gplugin_manager_refresh(manager);

Shutdown

When your application is shutting down you need to uninitialize GPlugin by calling

gplugin_uninit();