I downloaded KiCad 10.0.0 as AppImage (on Debian Trixie) from the official download page and after that, installed KiCad Push to Aisler Plugin version 3.0.1 both from the Aisler plugin repository and also manually by zipping the repository content and installing it via the plugin manager.
In both cases, the plugin installation is reported to be successful, however, the icon for uploading does not appear in the PCB Editor. I left the settings for the toolbars on their defaults, but also checked that the top toolbar contains the “IPC/Scripting plugins” section, if that matters. I am not able to find any error messages related to the plugin. The plugin remains installed if I restart KiCad, however, the icon still does not appear.
When I open the scripting console and `import requests`, this leads to an import error. So it seems the Python 3.11.2 environment in the AppImage does not come with that library, which I know has already been an issue with flatpak installs, but don’t know how to solve for AppImage bundles.
Has anybody faced the same issue? Does anybody have an idea how I can get the plugin running?
Using other distributions is no solution for me; Debian repos are too old and I need to maintain KiCad 8, 9 and 10 for managing legacy designs without upgrading them.
As far as I can see, that workaround is specific to a flatpak installation. I cannot use flatpak for KiCad 10 as I’d have to upgrade my current flatpak installation of KiCad 9 then, which I need for older projects that I cannot migrate. Therefore I chose to run KiCad 10 as AppImage, because that makes it a lot easier to keep separate versions of the software in parallel.
However, for the AppImage, I don’t know of an easy way to install modules into its Python distribution.
What I’ve tried so far:
Installing requests in the environment used by KiCads scripting shell (PCBnew: Tools > Scripting Console), but that fails:
# Python 3.11.2 (main, Apr 28 2025, 14:11:48) [GCC 12.2.0] on linux
# Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
# Startup script executed: /home/username/.config/kicad/10.0/PyShell_pcbnew_startup.py
import subprocess
# Fails with exit code 1:
subprocess.check_output(["pip", "install", "requests"])
# Returns paths to my system's Python installation (which is not 3.11.2):
subprocess.check_output(["which", "python"])
subprocess.check_output(["which", "pip"])
subprocess.check_output(["python", "--version"])
Launching the AppImage from a shell with a virtual environment activated which has Python with requests and wxPython installed – also does not seem to work / the Python from the environment is not picked up (REPL still shows Python 3.11.2, venv would have been 3.13).
Configuring a Python environment with requests installed as the scripting plugin environment in the settings (Preferences > Plugins > Path to Python interpreter), also without success (though I don’t think this setting is related to installed plugins anyway)
But taking a step back to not get thrown a red herring here: I could not yet confirm that failing to import requests is actually causing the plugin to break, because I don’t know how to get a log / change the log level to get output from the Python interpreter running the plugin; it just seemed likely to me with flatpak having the same problem. AppImage installations by themselves seem to be new as well, at least I cannot remember having that option when upgrading to KiCad 9. So this might be caused by something completely different.