Can I develop a SketchUp Ruby extension on Linux without having SketchUp installed?

Developers Ruby API
1

I’m planning to develop a SketchUp extension using the Ruby API, but my development machine is running Linux, and I currently don’t have SketchUp installed.
is there any whay for this

2

How do you plan to test it?

3

I plan to develop and test mainly on Linux using Ruby and VS Code, then use my friend’s Windows PC with SketchUp for final testing. I’ll use Git to move the code between my Linux PC and his Windows PC.(this is my plan for testing )

4

well, I’m not a dev, I only look like one (and hang out with too many) but as far as I understand, it’s a two part job.

first part, you write code. you can do that on linux, or even by hand on paper. I don’t recommend that one.

second, you copy/paste that in the ruby console, or you package that into a rb file nd run it in sketchup.

So yeah, on paper, in theory, I guess you can.
expect a lot of back and forth.

5

i see an repo GitHub - SketchUp/ruby-api-stubs: Auto-generated stubs for the SketchUp Ruby API. Useful for IDE intellisense and auto-complete. · GitHub
and GitHub - SketchUp/sketchup-extension-vscode-project: VSCode Project for SketchUp Extension Development · GitHub
for this i thing i can make this i think

6

I’m not a developer, but maybe these will be helpful to get started.

7

thank you

8

For me developing and testing might involve reloading SketchUp dozens of times a day. Not saying it’s impossible but developing for SketchUp without SketchUp seems very impractical.

9

Frankly, I think you are setting yourself for a load of frustration.

Although VSCode is a very nice development environment (I use it too), SketchUp plugin code can’t run at all except within the Ruby interpreter and library embedded in SketchUp. So, you can write nice-looking code and VSCode will help you fix things such as wrong argument lists to API calls, but it won’t actually execute the code and won’t help you debug it. Because Ruby is completely dynamic and untyped, many errors can’t be caught until sketchup tries to execute the code! Further, the right way to do things using the API often isn’t obvious and the examples given in the API documentation are notoriously frivolous, fragmentary, and in some cases erroneous.

You are going to waste a lot of time moving code back and forth between your Linux machine and the PC!

10

I was thinking on designing a personalized bull-bar for a jeep wrangler, I don’t have one but I’m planing to test it on my friend’s jeep, also I’ve never designed a bull-bar.

11

thank you,