Key Concepts

This page walks through the core concepts you’ll see throughout Pluraprint. You don’t need to memorize all of this up front: each term links to the page where it’s covered in depth.

Sites#

A Site is a physical/network grouping of printers and agents: a lab, a maker space, a library branch, a building. Sites exist for a technical reason: an agent can only reach the printers on its own network, so printers on separate networks or VLANs live in separate sites.

• Printers, agents, and stations all belong to exactly one site.
• Rules and quotas can apply to a single site, or globally across every site.

A site is not a tenant or an access-control boundary: permissions are controlled by roles, not by site. If you need to run genuinely separate organizations, each runs its own Pluraprint deployment. If you have a single location or network, you’ll likely only ever see one site.

See Sites.

Agents#

An Agent is a small piece of software that runs on a computer at your site and maintains a secure connection between Pluraprint and your physical printers. Think of it as the bridge between the cloud dashboard and the hardware on your bench.

• Each site has one or more agents.
• An agent doesn’t need any manual printer-by-printer setup: once it’s connected, any printers you add to that site become reachable.
• Agents show up in the dashboard as Online or Offline, so you always know whether your printers are reachable.

See Connecting an Agent.

Printers#

Printers are the 3D printers in your fleet. Pluraprint supports several printer brands out of the box (Bambu Lab and Formlabs models today), plus a “Debug” test printer useful for training new staff or testing your rules and quotas without tying up real hardware.

Each printer has:

• A name and the site it belongs to.
• A model, which determines what it can do (number of extruders, whether it has an automatic material system, whether it has a camera, etc.).
• Connection details specific to that model (for example, an IP address and access code for a Bambu Lab printer).
• Materials loaded into its slots, so Pluraprint knows what filament or resin is currently available.

See Adding a Printer.

Print jobs#

A print job represents one request to print a file. Jobs move through a lifecycle:

Draft → Processing → Awaiting Approval → Queued → Printing → Completed

Along the way, a job can also be rejected, cancelled, or fail. Every job has an owner (the person who submitted it, or who identified themselves at a kiosk), the file being printed, the materials and printer it needs, and a history of everything that’s happened to it.

See Submitting a Print Job and Tracking Your Print Jobs.

Rules and the requirements checklist#

Every print job has a checklist of requirements: things that must be true before the job is allowed to queue and print. Pluraprint builds this checklist automatically by combining every Rule that applies to the job.

Typical requirements include:

• The job must have an identified owner.
• The job’s printer model and materials must be defined.
• One or more people must approve the job.
• The job must stay under a maximum duration, material usage, or cost.

Each item on the checklist shows as:

• ✅ Done: satisfied
• 🟡 Pending: not yet known or not yet done (for example, waiting on an approval)
• 🔴 Blocked: the job cannot proceed (for example, it exceeds a hard limit)

Administrators write rules in plain-language conditions (“if the job is over 8 hours…”) using a visual builder: no code required. See How Rules & Quotas Work and Building Approval Rules.

Quotas#

Quotas cap how much a person, role, printer model, or your whole site can use over a time window, for example, “500g of filament per student per month” or “no more than 3 jobs printing at once.” Quotas can be hard (block the job) or soft (warn but allow it).

See Setting Usage Quotas.

Roles and permissions#

Roles are named bundles of permissions (for example, “Operator” or “Lab Manager”) that you assign to your teammates. Permissions control access to specific actions: viewing printers, approving jobs, managing rules, inviting users, and so on. Roles can apply everywhere, or be scoped to a single site.

See Roles & Permissions.

Stations#

A Station is a walk-up kiosk (typically a tablet or touchscreen) placed near your printers. Visitors and team members can identify themselves with a PIN or a tap of a card, prepare a job (choosing materials and printer), and submit it for approval, all without logging into the full web app.

See Stations Overview.