Stoatworks Burrow
One list for every plugin, tool and module
What it does
The Stoatworks software is spread across sixty-odd repositories — video plugins in two or three formats each, audio plugins as VST3 and Audio Units, applications, and Companion modules for Bitfocus Companion. Installing one by hand means finding its project page, working out which of six archives you want, unzipping it, and putting it in a folder whose location differs per format and per platform. Keeping them up to date means noticing that a release happened.
Burrow is one searchable list instead, under six tabs — Video plugins, Video tools, Audio, Networking & Infrastructure, Self-hosted, and Device firmware to come. It reads the folders your hosts actually load from, tells you what is current, what has an update and what you have never installed, and does the work. A tool that has a Companion module offers it on the tool’s own row, because that is the only place anyone would look for it.
It asks for an administrator password only when a batch genuinely needs one, which is two of the seven formats: OpenFX and After Effects plugins live in system folders and there is nowhere else those applications look. Audio plugins, applications and Companion modules never need one — an application goes to your own ~/Applications rather than asking for root when the shared folder is not yours to write to. Everything unprivileged happens first, so cancelling at the prompt still leaves the rest installed.
Every plugin's browser demo is built into the app, so you can try an effect before installing it, with no internet connection.
Using it is entirely optional. Every plugin is still a normal download from its own release page, and always will be.
- Everything in one searchable list under six tabs — Video plugins, Video tools, Audio, Networking & Infrastructure, Self-hosted and Device firmware to come — grouped into up to date, update available and not installed
- Per-format state on every row — a plugin can be current in Resolume and missing in Resolve, and the row says so
- Bitfocus Companion modules on the row of the tool they drive, installed into the developer modules folder Companion reads
- Applications installed from their disk image, into your Applications folder or your own one — never with a password
- Choose which formats to install by default, and override it for any single plugin
- One administrator prompt per batch, never one per plugin
- Release notes for every update, labelled honestly when a release carried no written notes
- Each plugin's browser demo built in, running offline from a local address
- Removes exactly what it installed and nothing else — other people's plugins in the same folder are invisible to it
- Works with no internet connection, and says plainly when the version numbers it is showing came from the copy that shipped with the app
- No account, no sign-in, no telemetry
- Claim software you installed yourself — matched by the bundle identifier inside it, never the filename — so it reports a version and takes updates; releasing hands it back untouched
Where it stands
Beta at v0.2.4. The catalogue, the install and uninstall paths, the archive guards and the privileged helper's refusals are exercised against real release archives on macOS. Nothing has yet been installed into a live host through the finished app — the folder work is verified against temporary directories, and the real Extra Effects folder is only ever read. The Windows privileged helper is not written.
Watch it running
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