Plugins

ASF includes support for custom plugins that can be loaded during runtime. Plugins allow you to customize ASF behaviour, for example by adding custom commands, custom trading logic or whole integration with third-party services and APIs.

This page describes ASF plugins from users perspective - explanation, usage and likewise. If you want to view developer's perspective, move here instead.

Usage

ASF loads plugins from plugins directory located in your ASF folder. It's a recommended practice (which becomes mandatory with plugin auto-updates) to maintain a dedicated directory for each plugin that you want to use, which can be based off its name, such as MyPlugin. Doing so will result in the final tree structure of plugins/MyPlugin. Finally, all binary files of the plugin should be put inside that dedicated folder, and ASF will properly discover and use your plugin after restart.

Usually plugin developers will publish their plugins in form of a zip file with binaries inside, which means that you should unpack that zip file to its own dedicated subdirectory inside plugins directory.

If the plugin was loaded successfully, you'll see its name and version in your log. You should consult your plugin developers in case of questions, issues or usage related to the plugins that you've decided to use.

You can find some featured plugins in our third-party section.

Please note that ASF plugins could be malicious. You should always ensure that you're using plugins made by developers that you can trust. ASF developers can no longer guarantee you usual ASF benefits (such as lack of malware or being VAC-free) if you decide to use any custom plugins. You need to understand that plugins have full control over ASF process once loaded, due to that we're also unable to support setups that utilize custom plugins, since you're no longer running vanilla ASF code.

Compatibility

Depending on plugin's complexity, scope and a lot of other factors, it's entirely possible that it'll require from you to use generic ASF variant, instead of usually recommended OS-specific. This is because OS-specific variant comes only with core functionality required for ASF itself, and your plugin may require parts that fall outside of main ASF scope, in result being incompatible with trimmed OS-specific builds.

In general, when using third-party plugins, we recommend using ASF generic variant for maximum compatibility. However, not all plugins may require it - please refer to your plugin's information in order to find out whether you need to use generic ASF variant or not.