instawow

instawow is a package manager for World of Warcraft. It can be used to install, remove and update add-ons from WoWInterface, CurseForge, Tukui and GitHub.

instawow tries to make installing, updating and removing add-ons quick and painless for those of us who are (ever so slightly) proficient with the command line and do not revel in using bloatware which infringe on our privacy or inhabiting walled gardens.

Indi-co-depedently, an instawow GUI is in early development. The GUI does not have feature parity with the CLI and is not particularly, rigorously, tested. However, it does offload add-on management to the instawow core.

Some of the features of instawow are:

• Interoperable CLI and GUI
• Fuzzy search with download scoring, backed by a catalogue which combines add-ons from WoWInterface, CurseForge and Tukui
• Ability to interpret add-on URLs and host IDs
• Add-on reconciliation which works with all three major hosts
• Rollback – ability to revert problematic updates
• Multiple update channels – 'stable', 'latest', and alpha and beta for CurseForge add-ons
• Dependency resolution on installation
• Version pinning of CurseForge and GitHub add-ons
• Wago integration – a WeakAuras Companion clone which can be managed like any other add-on

Installation

You can download pre-built binaries of the instawow CLI and GUI from GitHub:

• Binaries

If you would prefer to install the CLI from source, the following will work:

• pipx: pipx install instawow
• Vanilla pip: python -m pip install -U instawow
• From the AUR for Arch Linux: yay -S instawow

When installing from source, instawow requires Python 3.7 or greater.

Getting started

tl;dr

Begin by running instawow reconcile to register previously-installed add-ons with instawow (instawow reconcile --auto to do the same without user input). To install add-ons, you can search for them using the search command:

instawow search molinari

In addition, instawow is able to interpret add-on URLs and instawow-specific URNs of slugs and host IDs. All of the following will install Molinari from CurseForge:

instawow install https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/molinari
instawow install curse:molinari
instawow install curse:20338

You can update add-ons and remove them just as you'd install them. If update is invoked without arguments, it will update all of your installed add-ons. You can list add-ons and view detailed information about them using list --format detailed. For list and similarly non-destructive commands, the source can be omitted and the slug can be abbreviated, e.g. instawow reveal moli will open the Molinari add-on folder in your file manager.

Reconciling add-ons

instawow does not know about add-ons it did not itself install. The Twitch and Minion clients each use their own, proprietary fingerprinting algorithm to reconcile add-ons you have installed with add-ons their respective hosts keep on their servers. Though the details of their implementation elude me, instawow tries to accomplish something similar by combining a variety of cues (e.g. folders and TOC entries). This is not done automatically for you – instawow makes a point of not automatically assuming ownership of your add-ons or your preference of add-on host. However, you can run reconcile in promptless mode with the --auto flag, and instawow will prioritise add-ons from CurseForge because: (a) they see more frequent updates; and (b) the API is of a higher quality. Reconciled add-ons are reinstalled because it is not possible to reliably determine the installed version; consequently, it would not be possible to offer updates reliably.

Searching for add-ons

instawow comes with a rudimentary search command with results ranked based on edit distance. Search uses a collated add-on catalogue internally which is updated once daily. You can install multiple add-ons directly from search.

Dealing with pesky updates

instawow keeps a log of all versions of an add-on it has previously installed. Add-on updates can be undone using the instawow rollback command. Add-ons which have been rolled back are pinned and will not receive updates. Rollbacks can themselves be undone with instawow rollback --undo, which will install the latest version of the specified add-on using the default strategy.

Rollback is not supported for WoWInterface and Tukui.

GitHub as a source

instawow supports WoW add-ons released on GitHub; that is to say, the repository must have had a release – tags are not sufficient – and the release must have a ZIP file attached to it as an asset. instawow will not install or build add-ons directly from source, or from tarballs or 'zipballs'. Futhermore, instawow will not validate the contents of the ZIP file. I do not recommend using GitHub as a source unless an add-on cannot be found on one of the supported add-on hosts.

WoW Classic and instawow profiles

instawow supports Classic – it will correctly install Classic versions of multi-flavour add-ons provided that the game_flavour setting is set to classic. Assuming your default profile is configured for Retail, you can create a pristine profile for Classic by running:

instawow -p classic configure

You can create profiles for other versions of the game (e.g. PTR or beta) in the same way. You must prefix -p <profile> to instawow commands to manage each respective profile.

The any_flavour strategy can be used to install add-ons from CurseForge which do not have Classic releases but are known to work just as well:

instawow -p classic install -s any_flavour https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/colorpickerplus

Additional functionality

WeakAuras aura updater

instawow contains a WeakAuras updater modelled on WeakAuras Companion. To use the updater and provided that you have WeakAuras installed:

instawow weakauras-companion build
instawow install instawow:weakauras-companion

You will have to rebuild the companion add-on prior to updating to receive aura updates. If you would like to check for updates on every invocation of instawow update, install the instawow:weakauras-companion-autoupdate variant:

instawow install instawow:weakauras-companion-autoupdate
instawow update

Plug-ins

instawow can be extended using plug-ins. Plug-ins can be used to add support for arbitrary hosts and add new commands to the CLI. You will find a sample plug-in in tests/plugin.

Metadata sourcing

Originally, instawow relied on the official feeds provided by Curse. Curse retired the feeds in June 2018 and – for a period – instawow would scrape the CurseForge website. The alternative would have been to use the old XML-like API. Because the API was not built for third-party use, it had not been isolated from user accounts (cf. GitHub integrations). If users were to log into the API, instawow would acquire full access to their account. Authentication was also complicated by the ongoing Curse account migration to Twitch and is (or should be) unnecessary for the simple use case of installing and updating add-ons. Thankfully, Twitch migrated to an unauthenticated API interally in the second quarter of the year of the periodic table, which we have adopted for our own use. This is similar to what Minion, the WoWInterface-branded add-on manager, has been doing for years. The good people at Tukui provide an API for public use. instawow might break whenever one of our sources introduces a change to their website or API (though only temporarily).

Remote hosts

When installing, updating or searching for add-ons, instawow will retrieve scraped add-on metadata from https://raw.githubusercontent.com, CurseForge add-on metadata from https://addons-ecs.forgesvc.net, WoWInterface add-on metadata from https://api.mmoui.com, Tukui add-on metadata from https://www.tukui.org, GitHub add-on metadata from https://api.github.com, and aura data from https://data.wago.io; and will follow download URLs contained in metadata.

Every 24 hours, on launch, instawow will query PyPI (https://pypi.org) – the canonical Python package repository – to check for instawow updates.

Requests made by instawow can be identified by its user agent string.

Related work

The author of strongbox has been cataloguing similar software here. If you are unhappy with instawow, you might find one of these other add-on managers more to your liking.

Contributing

Bug reports and fixes are welcome. Do open an issue before committing to making any significant changes.