[[!meta title="Installing third party plugins"]]

Most ikiwiki plugins are perl modules and should be installed somewhere in
the perl module search path. See the @INC list at the end of the output of
`perl -V` for a list of the directories in that path. All plugins are in
the IkiWiki::Plugin namespace, so they go in a IkiWiki/Plugin subdirectory
inside the perl search path. For example, if your perl looks in
`/usr/local/lib/site_perl` for modules, you can locally install ikiwiki
plugins to `/usr/local/lib/site_perl/IkiWiki/Plugin`

You can use the `libdir` configuration option to add directories to the
search path. For example, if you set `libdir` to `/home/you/.ikiwiki/`,
then ikiwiki will look for plugins in `/home/you/.ikiwiki/IkiWiki/Plugin`. This
configuration option can be either a string (for backward compatibility) or a
list of strings (to add several directories to the search path).

Ikiwiki also supports plugins that are external programs. These are
typically written in some other language than perl. Ikiwiki searches for
these in `/usr/lib/ikiwiki/plugins` by default. If `libdir` is set, it will
also look under that directory, for example in `/home/you/.ikiwiki/plugins`.
Note that this type of plugin has to be executable for ikiwiki to use it.