Installing add-ons without display

Question

There are more and more packages on Matlab Central that are shared in the form of add-ons or custom toolboxes (extension .mltbx).

I'm using such toolboxes and when on my desktop I can simply install them by clicking on them. However my code is eventually deployed on a cluster, where none of the nodes has these toolboxes installed and none of the Matlab instance is run with display.

How can I install add-ons programmatically?

Answer 1

Poking around MATLAB's subroutines I couldn't figure out an obvious way to handle this programmatically without at least some user input.

That being said, the *.mltbx package is really just a *.zip file, which we can access directly inside MATLAB. To illustrate this, I've created a quick toolbox using my code prototyping folder, testcode-matlab.mltbx.

If you extract the contents of this file using unzip: unzip('testcode-matlab.mltbx', 'temp'); you should be left with something like the following:

If we examine the contents of fsroot, we see that it's the folder of data packaged into the toolbox:

So we can take this folder, move it to where we want using something like copyfile, and then add it to the MATLAB path using addpath:

copyfile('.\temp\fsroot', '.\mytoolboxes\testtoolbox');
addpath('.\mytoolboxes\testtoolbox');

Answer 2

As of R2016a, there is a MATLAB API to install them:

matlab.addons.toolbox.installToolbox('mytoolbox.mltbx')