JMeter Plugins Manager

The idea of JMeter Plugins Manager is simple: instead of installing various plugins manually, it will do it for you through nice UI. No need to mess with JARs anymore. Install Plugins Manager once and it will do it all for you: installing, upgrading, uninstalling.

The plugins it manages include usual plugins from JMeter-Plugins.org, various third-party plugins and even core JMeter plugins. This is important, because removing rarely used features like JDBC and LDAP will tidy up huge popup menus from unused items. As a bonus you will get the increased JMeter startup time.

You can observe the catalogue of plugins here. As the first experiment, try to uninstall all the plugins and see how bare JMeter looks like. Then install something. Then install something more. Have fun!

Installation and Usage

Download the Plugins Manager JAR file and put it into JMeter's lib/ext directory. Then start JMeter and go to "Options" menu to access the Plugins Manager.

The label on the menu item will say "has upgrades" in case any of your installed plugins have upgrades for it.

Clicking on menu item will bring up the plugins manager dialog:

The dialog has three tabs, "Review Changes" area and "Apply" button. Removing ticks from plugins on "Installed" tab will uninstall them. Setting ticks on "Available" tab will install the plugin.

The plugins that have upgrades will show in the list with italic font. Choose the new version you want to install for them from "Version" drop-down. By default, all upgradable plugins are selected for upgrade and listed on "Upgrades" tab.

The "Review Changes" pane is important, it lists all the changes that supposed to be done after you click "Apply" button. Sometimes plugins have dependencies from each other, so there might be additional plugins uninstalled. There is no hurry for important business, so review the changes prior to applying it.

Right mouse click over checkbox lists opens "Toggle All" option, which takes some time to toggle all items in the list.

If you want to use the Plugins Manager from command-line or programmatically, please read this guide.

If you face some issues where new plugins do not appear, then Plugins Manager might be using an outdated cached information. In this case, you can clear the folder referenced by System property "java.io.tmpdir"/pmgr_cache.

Add Your Plugin or Repository

Now there is an opportunity for anyone who creates the JMeter plugins to quickly make them available to wide audience of JMeter-Plugins.org. You don't have to contribute your source code into our repository, you can just create your project and maintain it, just using JPGC as distribution infrastructure. If you are interested, please raise the topic on our community forum to get more detailed instructions.

Plugins Sources Configuration

If you have need to serve additional internal plugins repository within your organization, you can do so by setting jpgc.repo.address JMeter property, adding URL for your proprietary plugins repository after semicolon like this:

jpgc.repo.address=https://jmeter-plugins.org/repo/;http://my.intranet.site/plugins-repo.json

First item is default plugins repository, second is "custom internal". You can have as many repos as you want, splitting them with semicolon character.

Plugins repository JSON has to satisfy requirements for its content. In case of plugins-ID conflict the earliest declared has precedence.

Usage Statistics Collected

By default, Plugins Manager sends some anonymous information to JMeter-Plugins.org, specifically: full version of JMeter used, list of installed plugins with their versions, anonymous unique ID for the installation. No personal identifiable information is sent. We analyze that information to learn more about which plugins deserve more development according to their popularity. Also, we share the statistics derived from usage reports on statistics page. The information is completely anonymous, you can validate that through our source code. You are free to disable these reporting by setting jpgc.repo.sendstats=false in JMeter properties.