Hermes URLs for Unreal Engine

Hermes URLs is a plugin for Unreal Engine that out of the box allows you to copy URLs to arbitrary assets in your project and share them with your team e.g. through Slack. Those links will then directly open the Unreal Editor to the linked asset.

In addition, Hermes provides easy-to-use APIs to register your own endpoints, so that you can create other direct deep links into the editor. E.g. you could create links that run automatic tests, link directly to a settings page, or whatever else strikes your fancy!

Big thanks to Krista A. Leemhuis for the amazing icons!

Setup

Hermes officially supports UE5 and is backwards compatible with UE4 version 4.27. Pull requests to support older versions are welcome.

1. Clone this repository into your project's Plugins folder
2. Start your editor - the URL is automatically registered when the editor first starts

By default, Hermes will register URIs that match the project name of your project. If you need more control over the scheme used by these URIs, you can use the HermesBranchSupport plugin which lives next to HermesCore, which lets you include the branch name in the URI scheme. You'll need to enable HermesBranchSupport in your .uproject, and then you can go to Edit > Preferences and find "Hermes URLs - Branch Support" under Plugins to configure it.

Hermes relies on hermes_urls to register with the OS and dispatch URL requests. It's a small Rust project, and its binaries are checked in to this repository (in HermesCore/Source/HermesURLHandler) for convenience's sake, but feel free to review the source and build your own if downloading EXE files from the internet puts you at (understandable) unease.

Using

Once you've set up Hermes, you should be able to right click any asset in the content browser and see a new "Copy URL that reveals asset" option:

Similarly, when you've opened any asset in the asset editor, you should see a new "Copy URL that opens asset" option in the "Asset" option from the menu bar:

Extending

Hermes is intended to be pretty customizable and extendible. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or send a pull request if you think your functionality should be a part of the core Hermes experience!

Creating custom URLs with your own functionality

To see how to create your own handler for custom URLs you can look at HermesContentEndpoint.cpp, which is the implementation of the asset links. The editor integration that lets you copy those links to the clipboard lives in HermesContentEndpointEditorExtension.cpp.

You can create a similar module in your own project and depend on HermesServer from your module, and you should be good to go.

Controlling what URL scheme / protocol your links have

If you want to have more control over the URL scheme / protocol than Hermes and HermesBranchSupport gives you, you can create your own IHermesUriSchemeProvider. It is a very small C++ interface that you register as a modular feature -- all you need to implement is a TOptional<FString> GetPreferredScheme() method. You can use HermesBranchSupport.cpp as a starting point for developing your own IHermesUriSchemeProvider to override the URI scheme used.

License

The icon is copyright (c) 2022 Jørgen P. Tjernø. All Rights Reserved.

Hermes URLs is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.