External tools

Hi,

I have a couple of external tools installed with SNAP. Among them, e.g., Sen2Cor that I installed via the Plugins -> Available Plugins tool as well as iCor that I installed via its own installer and then added through Plugins -> Downloaded -> Add Plugins.

When opening Manage External Tools all my plugins have the orange exclamation marked sign in the status column and a hoover-over note telling me ‘Tool executable not found!’. Likewise, the Tools -> External Tools menu is empty.

On the other hand, I can edit the setup and run at least iCor from the Manage External Tools. That is, the processing at least gets started (not successfully executed, but that’s another issue. I think. Or not?).

Should I worry? And how to fix that? Or just ignore?

I’m not sure about the “Tool executable not found!” message. Maybe it is not cleared after the path to the tool is set.
Maybe @kraftek can explain this?

Regarding ICOR, the tool is made for SNAP 5. So, it might or might not work with SNAP 6.
See

To answer myself (and future users, possibly):

Yes, you should worry. Not about iCor, but about the “internally” “installed” external tools. As @PM29 points out in their How-to-Sen2Cor notes, the “installation” via Plugins -> Available Plugins only installs a small plugin, not the tools themselves.

Became obvious when trying to run Sen2cor from within SNAP. SNAP noted that the bundled binaries need to be installed first and, nice, opened the corresponding window automatically and had that filled in properly already. Installed. Ran. Fine. Now Sen2Cor has a green hook. :slight_smile:
Not sure, whether the fill-in is always done automatically. That would be great. Or whether that had to do with that I had installed the stand-alone Sen2Cor already separately.

No time for now to check out and fix the remaining “internally” installed plugins/tools (Orfeo, Sen2Three,…). Might come back to that later.

In any case, I think, some notice in the installation notes on Sentinel toolbox/Third party tools webpages would be justified about that the plugin-installation is just… a plugin, it alone won’t make the user able to run the external tools. (on the other hand, if I understand correctly, one HAS to install the plugins. Which, as far as I remember, is not mentioned either in the third party tools intro or the external tool installation guides).