Configuring the Bridge
Configuring the Bridge
Two things to set before the first send: which catalog you’re uploading to, and how you authenticate to it. Everything else has a working default.
Open Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Showcade Bridge. The settings are grouped into four boxes — Catalog, Account, Behaviour, and Keymap.
The endpoint
The Endpoint is the asset API of the deployment you’re uploading to. Out of the box
it’s http://localhost:8787/api/assets, which suits a catalog running on your own
machine.
For the hosted product, that’s:
https://show.cade.run/api/assets
Choosing a credential
There are two kinds, and a deployment accepts one or the other — never both, and there’s no falling back from one to the other:
| Credential | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Session (Sign in) | The deployment authenticates users. This is the hosted product, and it’s the normal path. |
| Upload token | The deployment is configured with a single shared secret. Typically a local or private instance. |
If both are set, the session wins. That’s deliberate: the upload token has a default value out of the box, so preferring it would mean a signed-in user silently kept sending the wrong credential.
Test Connection
Press Test Connection (in the Catalog box, and again on the sidebar panel). It checks that the endpoint is reachable and that your credential is accepted, and it writes nothing — you can press it as often as you like.
Its failure message names the fix rather than the status code. A few worth recognising:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| not authorized — the session has expired, or check the upload token | The credential was rejected. Sessions expire; upload tokens don’t. |
| that endpoint is read-only (no upload token configured) — Sign in for a session token | You sent the shared upload token to a deployment that doesn’t take one. Press Sign in — that’s the hosted product’s normal path. |
| the catalog hit its storage ceiling | Delete some assets and try again. |
Signing in
Sign in (in the Account box) runs the OAuth 2.0 device grant — the flow built for exactly this situation, an application with no browser of its own and no cookie jar:
- The extension asks the auth service for a short user code.
- It opens your browser at the approval page and shows you the code.
- You sign in there as usual and approve.
- The extension’s next poll receives a session and stores it.
From then on your uploads are attributed to you — they land inside your own allowance and appear in your own listing rather than anonymously. There’s no loopback listener, no embedded browser, and the extension never sees your password. Once you’re signed in the Account box says so; it never renders the session itself, even masked.
Set Auth endpoint to the deployment’s auth API first. For the hosted product that’s
https://show.cade.run/api/auth.
A session expires; an upload token doesn’t. A 401 some time after signing in almost
always means the session lapsed — press Sign in again. Sign out forgets the stored
session, after which sends fall back to the upload token.
Every preference
| Preference | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Endpoint | http://localhost:8787/api/assets | The catalog’s asset API |
| Upload token | dev | Bearer token for writes, for a deployment that uses one |
| Timeout (s) | 30 | Per-request timeout, 1–600. Sends run off the UI thread, so this never freezes Blender |
| Skip TLS verification | off | For an HTTPS endpoint whose certificate your machine doesn’t trust. Leave it off for localhost — plain HTTP doesn’t need it |
| Auth endpoint | http://localhost:8787/api/auth | The auth API, used by Sign in |
| Session | (empty) | Filled in by Sign in; takes precedence over the upload token |
| Delete old uploads | on | After a successful send, delete the asset two generations back |
| Send on save | off | Re-send on every save of a collection that’s already linked and named |
Delete old uploads
Twenty iterations of a 6 MB model is 120 MB of dead blobs, and nothing else reclaims them. Leaving this on keeps the catalog from filling up with versions nobody will open again.
It deletes two generations back rather than one, so a browser still loading the previous version doesn’t have it pulled out from under it.
Send on save
Only fires for a collection that already has a link id and a name, so saving an
unrelated .blend never uploads anything. It’s off by default because a save is a cheap,
frequent gesture and an upload isn’t.
The keyboard shortcut
Ctrl+Shift+E in Object Mode sends. It’s drawn in the Keymap box with Blender’s stock rebind widget, so if it collides with another add-on you can change it there and the change persists like any other keybind. If you delete the shortcut outright, the box says so and you can add it back from the same place.