Transfering addons to a new blender version

melviso · Feb 2018

I wanted to ask if you have a new version of Blender (portable version) and a previous one also portable with all the scripts, keymapping setups and addons. Is there a way to transfer all this to the new one and delete the older version? I am tried of having to set this up everytime.

Thanks

-> ziwerliz · Feb 2018

Hey I have partial solution.
There is possibility to save your preferences, addon preferences and keymaps to cloud with.
https://cloud.blender.org/blog/introducing-blender-sync

thomasp · Feb 2018

what i do is fire up the new version once so it creates its preferences folder structure, then remove the contents and replace with those from my previous install. i've been doing this since 2.74, no need to reconfigure anything, not had any issues.

on windows it should be located in the user folder under appdata/roaming/blender foundation/<version number>.

melviso · Feb 2018

@thomasp Thanks a ton. This will be very helpful. I have always been reluctant to change to a newer version due to having to set everything up again.
@ziwerliz Thanks for the suggestion, mate.

RN · Feb 2018

What makes Blender work in portable mode is the presence of the 'config' folder inside the version folder inside the executable folder.
Like this: E:\Blender\blender.exe and E:\Blender\2.79\config\

You need to create that E:\Blender\2.79\config\ folder manually to make it run in portable mode. You can then copy your startup and blendprefs files to that \config\, and copy your add-ons to E:\Blender\2.79\scripts\add-ons\

In a normal installation that internal 'config' folder doesn't exist, there's only the one in your roaming user data.

renderhjs · Feb 2018

I upgraded today to Blender 2..79a and it turns out that it references the same 2.79 roaming folder on windows, which makes it seamless for me.

Tip: If you want to locate the roaming folder quickly run %appdata% in the address bar (Win + E) or in the run command (Win + R)

All addons and configurations are stored in there

thomasp · Feb 2018

just to add to my earlier comment - i encountered a behaviour where blender apparently needs to register the existence of a preferences folder before reading from it. simply copying the whole directory over without running blender first once so it could create it yielded the result that it still started up with its defaults even though my transferred prefs were in the correct location.

i'm using it on multiple operating systems and cannot recall where it did that so it might be some OS specific behaviour. i just put it on my checklist.

melviso · Feb 2018

@RN Thanks. I noticed there are some addons that don't go to the roaming folder so need to be copied to the portable config and addon folder. That was very helpful,
@renderhjs Very true. I tried it out. Updated to the newest blender version. It was just like you said. Thanks for the shortcut tip.
@thomasp Ok thanks. I am thinking maybe Blender devs could come up with some sort of small script or something that does all this with one click when you open a new version.

Transfering addons to a new blender version

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