How to load shelf in Houdini programatically

Question

I have recently started digging on tool development for houdini.

Is there a way to load a shelf in houdini propgamatically, like we can load shelf in maya.

Answer 1

While not strictly programatic I would recommend looking into the Houdini shelf/toolbar format as well as packages.

Houdini will load any .shelf files that it finds in the predefined toolbar search paths, and packages allow you to package and distribute collections of tools and environments (including the aforementioned toolbar search paths) in a nice self-contained way. You can think of packages as the Houdini equivalent of Maya's modules.

So if you want to distribute a tool with its own shelves you could have a package containing a "toolbar" folder, inside of which would be any number of .shelf files for the shelves you want to add.