Unreal Engine plugin development - hot reloading not working.

Working on a Mac.
I have completely switched from Xcode to Rider for my UE5 projects, and loving the numerous improvements, especially the hotloading which is magnitudes better experience.  For clarity: hot reloading works just fine with custom classes in a UE project.

I decided to test to see if I could create a UE5 plugin that I could share amongst all my UE5 projects.
I have successfully created a test plugin using Rider, which I have inside the Plugins folder of my UE5 project.  It is enabled and working in my project. The only function implemented is a simple print to screen and print to log.
I have been testing by making simple changes to the text that is printed.

So far, I have been unable to get any hotloading to work for this new plugin.
In Rider's Solution window, right clicking on the plugin's directory and choosing ‘Build Selected Projects' then results with a modal window saying “Build may fail because the application is running”.
Selecting to Build, returns no errors, but no changes to the code are live when using PIE in UE.
Selecting Stop and Build, closes the project, but also triggers a UE crash report window (annoying but so what).

Reopening the project through Rider does in fact work to show code changes when running PIE, but this workflow is far from ideal when doing iterative testing.  

Is there something I am missing? Or a workflow someone could recommend? Or is UE plugin development not suited for the hotloading workflow that a UE project utilizes?

My intent was to work on my UE project, and as I add functionality that my other projects could use, I add this functionality to a plugin.
That way I avoid migrating code [changes] across projects.
Thanks for any insight or help 🙏

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1 comment

Thank you for contacting Rider support. At the moment, there is no way to trigger hot reload of a plugin from Rider. Meantime you can do it from Unreal Editor instance:

  • Go to Tools | Debug | Modules;
  • Find the necessary module (name of your plugin) and press "Recompile";

I registered this feature request and we would appreciate it if you could upvote it to demonstrate your interest: RIDER-126308 Support invoking 'Recompile' for plugins from Rider UI

Should you have any other questions, please tell me. Have a nice day!

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