FAQ

If you’re new to napari, welcome and don’t fret! www.napari.org will help you install and get viewing in no time.

napari is a community partner on the image.sc forum and all help and support requests should be posted on the forum with the tag napari. We look forward to interacting with you there.

Bug reports should be made on napari’s github issues using the bug report template. If you think something isn’t working, don’t hesitate to reach out - it is probably us and not you!

Plugin authors provide their recommended installation instructions on their plugin detail page in the installation section.

Some plugins can be installed using the Plugins menu in napari. For this method, open napari and navigate to Plugins > Install/Unistall Package(s). Search for the plugin using the package name, which is the name in smaller font beneath the plugin name on the napari hub and may be the same as the plugin name. Click the blue “install” button. The plugin will move to the “Installed Plugins” list upon completion. If it seems that the installation failed, try restarting napari as some plugins may not show as installed until napari has been reopened.

Plugin authors are encouraged to add links to their listing, showing users of their plugin where to find help.

If the plugin author has not indicated where to get help, the image.sc community is a great place to ask questions about napari and napari plugins.

We use fuse.js for the plugin search engine. You should be fine with most queries, but if you want to perform more advanced search queries, you can use extended search operators to fine tune your search results.

Examples

By default, whitespace will be considered as an AND operator. To combine results using OR, use the pipe operator:

console | animation

To find results that include a word (without fuzzy matching), use the apostrophe operator:

'video

To find results that start with a particular string, use the prefix operator.

^napari

Similar to find results that end with a particular string, use the suffix operator:

napari$

The napari hub is a service of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in collaboration with napari, built by the CZI imaging team. You can learn more about who is steering this ship by visiting the about page.

Oh no, we didn’t answer your questions! Our apologies. We recommend you ask any hub community questions in github discussions- we value open source engagement and you never know who might have the right answer! For a full list of everyone involved, check out the contacts page.

You can learn more about building a plugin for napari by reading this documentation, which will guide you through creating a plugin, using your plugin to extend napari's functionality, and sharing your plugin with the world.

To add your plugin to the napari hub, simply push it to PyPI. If you used the napari plugin cookiecutter as a template for your plugin, it comes already configured to deploy to PyPI when you tag a versioned release.

We poll PyPI for updates every 5 minutes.

We source metadata for your plugin's listing from both PyPI and Github. In addition to a bunch of standard PyPI stuff, we support additional custom fields, like a user-friendly description to complement your Github README. Check out Customizing your plugin's listing to see what metadata we will present and where we source it from.

The napari hub supports Shields.io shields for your repository linking to your plugin’s listing page. If you want to add a shield to your README or other markdown files, you can copy & paste the snippet:

[![napari hub](https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://api.napari-hub.org/shields/<your-plugin-name-here>)](https://napari-hub.org/plugins/<your-plugin-name-here>)

If you just want the badge SVG, you can access that at the URL below.

https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=https://api.napari-hub.org/shields/<your-plugin-name-here>

Yes, you can! The napari-hub-cli is a command-line tool that lets you preview your metadata and make sure that you’ve included everything the hub is looking for. Simply install it on your local development machine and point it at your local repository.

If you remove your plugin from PyPI or yank a release, it will be removed from the napari hub within approximately 5 minutes.

If you want your plugin to be available on PyPI, but not be visible on the napari hub, please check out our documentation on visibility settings.

We check PyPI every 5 minutes, so if you just pushed it to PyPI, you might just need to go and get a cup of coffee.

Search PyPI directly for your plugin among those tagged with “Framework :: napari”

If your plugin is on PyPI, but not showing up in that search, then you don’t have the “Framework :: napari” trove classifier properly defined.

If your plugin does show up under “Framework :: napari” on PyPI, but not on the hub, go and grab a cup of coffee. If it still doesn’t show up after 5 minutes, open an issue and our team will look into it as soon as we can.

We only pull plugin info from Github when we detect a new plugin or new release on PyPI. However, if you’d like to update your plugin listing with the latest metadata from your Github repo, just let us know by submitting an issue and we can manually trigger a refresh of your plugin metadata from Github.

To be considered an “open source” plugin, the hub must be able to detect that your plugin is distributed with an OSI-approved open source license. That happens in one of two ways:

• If you’ve linked to a Github repository, we’ll source the license from Github’s API, which inspects your LICENSE file and infers the correct license.
• If Github fails to identify your license, we’ll fallback on whatever you’ve specified in your Python setup. Note: this MUST be a valid SPDX license identifier in order to be detected as an “open source” license, such as “BSD-3-Clause”... “BSD-3” will not be recognized as “open source”.

For more information on how we source this metadata, see the "License" section of "Customizing your plugin's listing"