Setup of development environment

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1

Hey folks, I just tried to find the documentation of how to setup an RIOT development environment to send it to colleagues, but failed. The best documentation I found is currently hosted on a third-party page:

The documentation in the Wiki and doc.riot-os.org seems to be outdated and incomplete (https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/wiki/Family:-ARM is linking the deprecated launchpad toolchain and not listing the required packages). Am I just blind?
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2

I am working a bit on this (more for me to have a reproducible setup).

It is based on ansible but I would like to use to to deploy developer environments.

There is always https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/tree/master/dist/tools/packer/scripts but I don’t know how up to date things are.

The other thing that I have not considered is different OSes.

3

That seems overly complicated. For the common case

sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi python3-serial

is enough.

For debugging installing

sudo apt install gdb-multiarch openocd

should suffice - although openocd would best be compiled from source as the last release is pretty old.

4

Another way to get the toolchain is to use the Docker image:

sudo apt install docker

Then, use BUILD_IN_DOCKER=1 for each build command.

You still have to use your system package manager or build by hand to get the other tools (serial, debugger and programmer).

For Python packages, I think it would make sense to include a requirements.txt file at the root of RIOTBASE. Then installing the Python package would be as simple as pip install -r requirements.txt. This file will not only contain the python3-serial package but also all packages used for SUIT for example.

5

The https://github.com/RIOT-OS/Tutorials “setup” section is an OK starting point, Jose had this install script https://github.com/jia200x/RIOT-scripts that I used a bunch of times in the past. I have also been wanting to add flashing in docker support for a while now https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/12419.

But I agree that ATM how to setup RIOT is not clear at all, and a big problem IMO. I think we should add a setup that would cover:

In my experience OSX is a pain but… https://lists.riot-os.org/pipermail/users/2020-March/001522.html can be a good starting point.

As a first initial step simply using the setup in “Tutorials” could be a good idea. @MrKevinWeiss Can you point to what you have so far? Maybe there is more people in the community with some setup experience?

6

Unfortunately that won’t work for my use case since the GCC on the Ubuntu version I’m forced to work on isn’t compatible. Installing a custom ARM toolchain isn’t complicated, but it took me too long for my taste to figure out what to install.

7

For the use of RIOT on windows, I am currently developing in WSL2.

I works quite well for development and ease of use. However you would still need to program using windows or another device, as WSL2 cannot access the USB devices.

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8

I used msys2 to setup RIOT!