11.4. Development and plugins on Unix
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## 11.4. Development and plugins on Unix

Plugins make some aspects of development easier and some harder.

The first thing is that you’ll have to run `cmake` once more to setup your build environment.

The good news is that if you are working on a single plugin then you will find recompiling the plugin MUCH faster than recompiling a dissector and then linking it back into Wireshark. Use "make plugins" to compile just your plugins.

The bad news is that Wireshark will not use the plugins unless the plugins are installed in one of the places it expects them to find.

One way of dealing with this problem is to set an environment variable when running Wireshark: `WIRESHARK_RUN_FROM_BUILD_DIRECTORY=1`.

Another way to deal with this problem is to set up a working root for wireshark, say in $HOME/build/root and build Wireshark to install there

    cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${HOME}/build/root && make install

then subsequent rebuilds and installs of your plugin can be accomplished by going to the plugins/foo directory and running

    make install

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