Install Plugins without administrator privileges. GPUP.exe

AdcubumIT

Hello

I’m working as a system engineer for a fairly big software development company. We are working on windows machines in an domain environment. Some of our developers use notepad++ as their favourite texteditor. Since our users don’t have administrator privileges on their machines, they can’t install additional plugins for n++.

I tried to make this possible for them by different ways. For example: I created a GPO and copied all the needed .dll files that the plugin manager adds to the n++ folder, once it is installed. This allowed the users to use the plugin manager. They are able to download and install plugins to n++, but once they are downloaded, notepad asks for a restart the make some changes, at this point it launches gpup.exe and an UAC dialog appears. Without administrator privileges the can’t get around this, it keeps asking for the restart and the only way to fix this is by entering username and password of an admin account.

I also tried to grant read/write acces to all of the n++ files in it’s installation directory, with these rights, it’s possible for them to install plugins by coping them in the plugins folder, but it behaves like the gpo method, it launches gpup.exe and asks for an admin.

Another idea that I had was to use a RunAs tool and launch the gpup.exe with it, but I couldn’t do it with that either, since n++ always launches the original gpup.exe

Is there anyway I can allow my users to launch gpup.exe without admin rights?

Regards,
Daniel

dail

I work on a machine where I don’t have administrative privileges. Notepad++ can load plugins from the users %APPDATA% directory. There is an option to allow this when installing Notepad++. You can also do this after it is installed by creating an empty file named allowAppDataPlugins.xml in the directory where Notepad++ is installed. The plugins will then be installed and loaded from the %APPDATA% directory which doesn’t require admin privileges.

This should allow the users to install most plugins. A few plugins still need admin privileges (e.g. PythonScript) but the majority of them work just fine this way.

AdcubumIT

Hi Dail

Thank you for sharing your solution with me :)
I’ll try it out and post my results here