Plugins

Plugins are additional components — developed by the FPP developers or by others — that add functionality within FPP, for more complex operations than a script. You can install a plugin from the list, install a third‑party plugin, or develop your own. Open Content Setup → Plugin Manager.

FPP 10 rebuilt this page around a card grid: every plugin is a tile showing its icon (or its initials if it has none), name, author, a short description, its category, how many installs it has, and an Install / Uninstall button.

Finding a plugin

• Tabs – Available, Installed and Updates each carry a live count, so you can see at a glance how many plugins are installed and how many have an update waiting.
• Search – the single box at the top right filters as you type. At the Developer UI level it doubles as the way to load a plugin that is not in the list: paste the URL of its pluginInfo.json, or the address of its GitHub repository such as github.com/owner/repo (add /tree/<branch> to use a branch other than the default), and FPP loads its details. (Without a valid pluginInfo.json, a plugin will not install. FPP warns if the URL is missing a scheme such as https://.)
• Categories – pills across the top (Audio, Automation, Data Feeds, Display & Video, Hardware, Interaction, Messaging, Monitoring, Payments, Other, plus All) filter the grid, each showing how many plugins it holds. The counts follow your search, so you can see where the matches are.
• Popular Plugins – a row of the most‑installed plugins across the community, as a starting point if you do not know what you are looking for.

Installing and managing

Click a card to see its details and privacy disclosure without installing anything, or Install to install it. Check for Updates re‑queries every plugin now (the Updates tab shows its progress and how old the last answer is). Where several plugins need attention there are bulk Update All, Reinstall All and Uninstall All actions, and each installed plugin also has its own Reinstall. An installed plugin gains an Open button that jumps straight to its configuration page.

Plugins marked OFFICIAL are maintained as part of the FPP project. Each listed plugin also shows the month it joined the plugin list — that says nothing about how recently its code changed. A plugin that has not been updated for this release is flagged NOT UPDATED FOR FPP 10 and its button changes to Install anyway — it may work, but it has not been verified against FPP 10. Plugins known to be incompatible are tucked into a collapsed Incompatible Plugins section at the bottom of the page rather than cluttering the grid.

Installed plugins whose author has set it up show a Release notes icon next to the privacy lights (and a link in the plugin's details), showing what has changed — the plugin's latest GitHub release, the list of changes an Update would bring in, or notes the plugin writes itself.

Plugin updates. FPP checks for plugin updates in the background (one plugin at a time, at low priority, when someone opens the web interface and the last answer is a few hours old). When an update is waiting, a puzzle‑piece icon appears in the header of every page; hover it to see which plugins, or click it to open the Updates tab. A plugin FPP could not check — its repository has moved or needs a token, or the player is offline — is listed there with the reason, never as up to date. Updating a plugin also installs any new dependencies it needs, and an upgrade reloads the plugin inside FPPD rather than needing a restart.

Note

In FPP 10 plugins can be loaded and unloaded while FPP is running, so installing or removing one no longer always means restarting FPPD. FPP will tell you when a restart is needed. After an FPPOS upgrade, FPP prompts you to reinstall your plugins.

Note

Most plugins require some configuration before they work correctly. The plugin author chooses which menu heading the plugin appears under; its configuration pages appear at the bottom of that menu drop‑down (there may be more than one). Refer to the plugin's home/help page for setup, and only install plugins you trust, as they run with full access to the device.

Tip

At the Developer UI level each card also shows the plugin's open issue and pull‑request counts, which is a quick way to gauge how actively a plugin is maintained.

Privacy lights

A plugin has full access to the player: it can change any setting, disrupt your show, and reach anything on the networks the player is connected to. The first time you install a plugin, FPP shows a short note saying so and asks you to continue (once per player, and again after each major FPP upgrade).

To help you choose, each plugin's author fills in a short privacy disclosure, which FPP turns into six coloured lights — small dots on the card, and in full when you click the card or press Install:

Light	Question it answers
Sends data	Does it send anything off this player, and to whom?
Collects data	Does it keep information about you, your household or your visitors?
Camera & mic	Does it use a camera, microphone or similar sensor, and does it record?
Remote access	Can it be reached from outside this player, or from the internet?
System changes	Does it change the player itself, beyond its own files?
Source (Can it be checked?)	Is all of its code somewhere anyone can look at it?

Green means the author says there is nothing to report under that heading; amber and red describe something you may want to know about, such as sending data to an online service or including closed‑source code. Grey means the author left that heading out. Hover a light to read what the author wrote, or tap it to open Full disclosure. If the author has written no disclosure at all, FPP says so in red, every light reads not disclosed, and the button reads Install anyway.

Note

The lights come from what the author wrote. Listed plugins are scanned automatically to compare the disclosure with the code when they join the list and from time to time afterwards, which catches many omissions — but it is not an audit, it cannot see inside closed‑source parts, and a plugin loaded from a URL has had no scan at all. The lights describe what a plugin says it does; they do not limit what it can do.

When an update or reinstall would change a plugin's disclosure, FPP shows you the new one first and asks you to accept it; Cancel leaves that plugin as it is. Update All and Reinstall All ask about each such plugin in turn before anything runs.

Note

If a plugin keeps information about your visitors or passers‑by — phone numbers, messages, votes, camera images — its Collects data or Camera & mic light is red, and what happens to that information is your responsibility.

Plugin logs and health

All plugin activity is written to a single unified plugin.log, which makes install and runtime problems much easier to trace — see Help → Troubleshooting Commands. FPP also keeps an install history of the plugins installed, updated and removed on the player — including any system packages that changed while it installed a plugin's dependencies or ran its scripts — and lists settings and packages left behind by removed plugins; both are on the Plugins tab of Troubleshooting Commands. FPP also tracks whether each installed plugin is official, community or unknown, and surfaces that in the System Health Check.

Tip

Take an FPP Backup before installing plugins, packages or scripts, so you can roll back if something misbehaves.