# Installing DITA-OT plug-ins

Plug-ins are generally distributed as zip files. There are two steps to installing a plug-in: unzipping and integrating.

It is possible to define a plug-in so that it may be installed anywhere, although most expect to be placed in either the demo/ or plugins/ directory inside of the DITA-OT. Most plug-ins do not require a specific install directory and can go in either of the default locations, but some may come with instructions for a particular install directory. The first step to installing a plug-in is to unzip to the desired location.

The remaining step is to integrate the new plug-in. This can be accomplished in a few ways:

1. From the toolkit directory, you can run the following command to integrate all installed plug-ins:

       ant -f integrator.xml

   The integration process has two modes, lax and strict. In the strict mode the integration process will immediately fail if it encounters errors in plug-in configurations or installation process. In the lax mode, the integration process will continue to finish regardless of errors; the lax mode does not imply error recovery and may leave the DITA-OT installation into a broken state. The default mode is lax due to backwards compatibility, to run the integration in strict mode:

       ant -f integrator.xml strict

   To get more information about the integration process, run Ant in verbose mode:

       ant -f integrator.xml -verbose strict

2. Any build that uses the Java command line interface automatically runs the integrator before processing begins.
3. Ant based builds may import the `integrator.xml` file, and add `integrate` to the start of the dependency chain for the build.
   Note: The integration process in considered part of the installation process and running it before each conversion will incur a preformance penalty.