instawow 1.13.3

CLI for managing World of Warcraft add-ons

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.

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An instawow GUI is in early development. The macOS version is available for download from GitHub releases. The GUI does not have feature parity with the CLI as yet. Notably, it does not interface with the WeakAuras Companion plug-in.

Installation

You can download pre-built binaries of instawow from GitHub:

• Binaries

If you prefer to install from source, all of the following will work:

• pipx: pipx install instawow

• Vanilla pip: python -m pip install -U instawow

• Nix: nix-env -if https://github.com/layday/instawow-nix/tarball/master

Getting started

tl;dr

Begin with running instawow reconcile (or instawow reconcile --auto to reconcile add-ons without user input) to register previously-installed add-ons with instawow. 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, 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. The argument of list and similarly non-destructive commands can be a substring of the add-on name; for instance, instawow reveal molinari will open the Molinari add-on folder in your file manager.

instafying 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; you will need to run instawow reconcile to absorb add-ons installed through other means. The --auto flag automates the reconciliation process.

Searching for add-ons

instawow comes with a rudimentary search command which allows you to select add-ons to install. The search does not display add-on details other than the name and source; pressing <o> will bring the add-on page up in your browser. Search uses a collated add-on catalogue internally which is updated once daily.

Dealing with pesky updates

As of version 1.10.0, instawow keeps a log of all versions of an add-on it has installed in the past. Add-on updates can be reverted using the instawow rollback command. Rollbacked add-ons and versioned add-ons more generally cannot be updated. 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 currently only supported for CurseForge and GitHub.

GitHub as a source

instawow purports to support WoW add-ons released on GitHub; that is to say, the repository must have a release associated with it and that release must carry a ZIP file as an asset. instawow will not install or build add-ons from source.

I do not recommend using GitHub as a source unless an add-on cannot be found in a domain-specific source.

WoW Classic

instawow supports Classic – it will correctly install Classic versions of add-ons from sources depending on the value of the game_flavour configuration setting. What instawow does not have is a switch you can flick to go from managing your retail add-ons to managing your classic add-ons and vice versa. This was a conscious design decision, the merits of which – I should admit – are open to debate. If you are already using instawow for Retail, you will need to set up a profile for Classic. To activate an alternative profile, you must use the --profile/-p option. Assuming your default profile is configured for retail, you can create a pristine profile by running:

instawow -p classic configure

You must then prefix -p classic to commands to manage your Classic profile.

Before v1.12, the only way to create a new profile was to override the default configuration folder in the environment. This remains an option. In Bash:

INSTAWOW_CONFIG_DIR=~/.config/instawow-classic instawow

The any_flavour strategy can be used to install add-ons from CurseForge which have not been released for Classic but work just as well. Taking ColorPickerPlus as an example:

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 -a <your account name>
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, exposing your account name as an env var:

WAC_ACCOUNT=<your account name> instawow install instawow:weakauras-companion-autoupdate
WAC_ACCOUNT=<your account name> instawow update

You may then choose to bypass the companion add-on when updating simply by ommitting the env var.

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 wowman 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.