SketchUp Ruby API

The SketchUp Ruby API allows you to interact with SketchUp models and the SketchUp application. It is available from within SketchUp, it cannot be used by itself.

Get started with the Ruby API Overview.

Visit our SketchUp Developer Center for more information and resources on SketchUp's APIs.

LayOut API

As of SketchUp 2018 you can also create and manipulate LayOut documents. For more information refer to the LayOut API Overview.

Currently the LayOut Ruby API is only available from SketchUp.

Examples and Tutorials

Getting Started

To get you started we have a collection of examples of tutorials. These will take you through various common scenarios and concepts of the SketchUp API.

github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-api-tutorials

Ruby C Extensions within SketchUp

Ruby itself allows you to work with Ruby code via C (and C++). This allows for more complex functionality and possible performance improvements. We provide examples on how to create Ruby C Extensions that work with various SketchUp versions and platforms:

github.com/SketchUp/ruby-c-extension-examples

Debugging

To make debugging SketchUp Ruby extensions easier we have a Ruby debugger interface that can be added to your SketchUp installation. This will let you use the debugging functionality of IDEs/editors that support the Ruby Debug protocol:

github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-debugger

We also have a guide on setting up RubyMine as an example of how you can set up your debugger:

github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-api-tutorials/wiki/RubyMine-Debugger-Setup

Testing

The standard testing frameworks for Ruby usually assume your tests are run from Ruby's console interpreter. This pose a problem when you want to set up unit tests for your code that needs to run within SketchUp.

To address this we created TestUp, a wrapper on top of Minitest that works within SketchUp along with a GUI interface to manage your tests.

github.com/SketchUp/testup-2

Tools

Give your IDE insight to the SketchUp Ruby API by feeding it stubs:

github.com/SketchUp/ruby-api-stubs

As an example of how to set up your IDE we created an example that describe the process for RubyMine:

github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-api-tutorials/wiki/RubyMine-Project-Setup#making-the-ide-sketchup-api-aware

VSCode example:

github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-extension-vscode-project

Documentation

If you find a typo, unclear description etc in the documentation, please log a new issue in the issue tracker for our APIs: github.com/SketchUp/api-issue-tracker/issues