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Plugins

The plugin system of Electrum is designed to allow the development of new features without increasing the core code of Electrum. There are two types of plugins, internal and external plugins.

To enable or disable Plugins, see Menu Bar > Tools > Plugins.

png/plugins.png

Internal Plugins

Internal Plugins are shipped with Electrum and maintained in the Electrum repository.

External Plugins

Electrum supports importing third party plugins from .zip files. Once you obtained a plugin you can load it with the Add button in the plugins dialog.

Alternatively, if you are running Electrum from sources, you may clone a third-party plugin repository, and add a symbolic link in your electrum/electrum/plugins directory.

Note

A list of internal and external plugins can be found at plugins.electrum.org.

Setting up the plugin password

To prevent loading malicious plugins (e.g. by malware) Electrum will require you to define a plugin password when loading an external Plugin the first time. The plugin password is independent of the currently open wallet and can be reset if forgotten.

To check the authenticity of plugins without requiring to enter the password on each startup Electrum requires you to store a public key text string with root permissions. The root permissions prevent malware from modifying the string.

On Linux

Open a Terminal and run the following commands:

1. Create the directory:
$ sudo mkdir -p /etc/electrum
2. Open a text editor with root permissions:
$ sudo nano /etc/electrum/plugin_pubkey
3. Paste the public key string in the text editor.
4. Exit the nano editor with CTRL + X.

On Windows

1. Open a Run Dialog using Windows + R keys.
2. Enter 'regedit' and press Enter.
3. Navigate to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE'.
4. Create a new directory named 'Electrum'.
5. In the directory 'Electrum', create a new directory called 'PluginKey'.
6. Inside the 'PluginKey' directory, create an entry with your public key string as value.

See the following screenshot:

png/external_plugin_windows_regedit.png

Plugin Development

If you are interested in developing your own plugin, please read :ref:`Electrum Plugin development <plugin_dev>`