LVAddons is a version-independent, system-level installation location for LabVIEW drivers, toolkits, and other add-ons. If you are developing an add-on, use LVAddons to maintain compatibility between LabVIEW and your add-ons even when users upgrade LabVIEW.

Introduced in LabVIEW 2022 Q3

In general, you use add-ons in LVAddons in the same way as add-ons in the LabVIEW folder.

Certain LabVIEW behaviors differ between versions that do not support LVAddons and versions that do:

Objective Behavior Before LVAddons Support Behavior With LVAddons Support
Install and upgrade add-ons
  1. You must install add-on content in the version-specific LabVIEW directory for your LabVIEW version.
  2. You must upgrade add-ons for each new version of LabVIEW.
 For add-ons that use LVAddons, no need to upgrade or reinstall the add-ons when you upgrade LabVIEW to a newer version.
Use symbolic paths, such as <vilib> Symbolic paths could resolve to a specific folder for a given version of LabVIEW. Symbolic paths represent a list of locations.

For example, LabVIEW virtually combines all vi.lib folders under LVAddons with the vi.lib in the top-level LabVIEW folder.

LVAddons requires you to separate the source files for a VI from the compiled code. The first time LabVIEW loads VIs from LVAddons, LabVIEW compiles the VIs and stores the compiled code in a cache that is specific to that version of LabVIEW. As a result, add-ons in LVAddons take longer to load when you use the add-on for the first time.

By default, LabVIEW uses a single LVAddons folder at the following location, depending on your operating system:

  • Windows—C:\Program Files\NI\LVAddons
  • Linux—/usr/local/natinst/share/lvaddons/
  • macOS—/Library/Application Support/National Instruments/LVAddons/

    • You can use configuration tokens to change the location of LVAddons or to create additional LVAddons locations[1]1 Creating additional LVAddons locations is available in LabVIEW 2024 Q1 and later..

    1 Creating additional LVAddons locations is available in LabVIEW 2024 Q1 and later.