Houdini | Loading HDA's via JSON package

Set up a folder on shared drive that holds all the fun HDAs you collect as well as any you create yourself

I chose to organize mine like this:
P:\Library\houdini\HDAs\3rdparty\archive
P:\Library\houdini\HDAs\3rdparty\live\otls

P:\Library\houdini\HDAs\tlittle\archive
P:\Library\houdini\HDAs\tlittle\live\otls

I can keep all kinds of possible HDA files in the archive folders, organized by source, and then when I am confident I want to have access to one of those HDAs in houdini I just copy that hda from the archive folder into the “live” folder. That way I can maintain a large library of possible HDAs but limit which ones are currently active.

Then I make a .json file named something like “tim_loadHDA_repository.json” and place it in one of the locations that houdini automatically scans for content like my user documents folder. Important to place the json file in the “package” subfolder like this:
C:\Users\timhl\Documents\houdini22.0\packages\tim_loadHDA_repository.json

the contents of the json file look like this:

{
  "enable": true,
  "hpath" : [
        "P:/Library/houdini/HDAs/3rdparty/live",
        "P:/Library/houdini/HDAs/tlittle/live"
    ]
  
}

The “enable” allows me to turn on / off this json file without actually deleting it. I list multiple paths. It is important that in each path there exists a subfolder named either “otls'“ or “hda” so that houdini recognizes there are hda files to load

Each path I list is added onto the existing houdini search paths. The nice thing is that each json file is read additively, so you are not “setting” a static path that may be replaced by another json file elsewhere. Each one is concatenated together. There are more fancy tricks you can do in the json file, can read about them in the help docs

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/plugins.html