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# Loading a Plug-in

There are two ways to load and unload a plug-in. The easiest way to load a plug-in is to use the Plug-in Manager.

To load a plug-in from the Plug-in manager

1. Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager to open the Plug-in Manager window and display the list of all known plug-ins.
2. Find the plug-in you need and click the "Loaded" check box to load the plug-in.

The Plug-in Manager uses the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH environment variable to locate available plug-ins to load.

The MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH is scanned only once when you first open the window. This allows subsequent opens to be very fast. As a result, if you create a new plug-in on the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH while Maya is running, it will not show up in the Plug-in Manager. To access newly created plug-ins, do one of the following:

- Click the Refresh button located in the Plug-in Manager window to update the list. This causes the directories to be scanned for changes to the window's contents.
- Use the loadPlugin MEL command.
- Restart Maya.

To load a plug-in from the command line

1. Assuming that you have a plug-in named "circleNode" in the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH, you can use MEL’s loadPlugin command.

       loadPlugin "circleNode";

This searches MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH for a file named circleNode.so on the Linux platform, a file named circleNode.mll on the Windows platform, and a file named circleNode.bundle on Mac OS X. Once found, it will be loaded into Maya as a plug-in.

To load a plug-in written in Python you must explicitly specify the .py extension:

    loadPlugin "circleNode.py";