Development Environment Setup¶

Before you can compile, you need to set up our development environment. You only need to do this once.

When you see $ it means this is a shell command - run the command after the $ but don’t include the $. The shell commands may also be prefixed with a folder name, meaning it needs to be run from a particular location, e.g. foo/ $ ls means to run ls from the foo folder.

Install Git¶

You need to install Git to retrieve the source code repository for the vi-firmware.

Windows¶

Install GitHub for Windows, which includes a GUI for cloning Git repositories hosted at GitHub as well as a Bash terminal for using Git from the command line.

Mac OS X¶

Install GitHub for Mac, which includes a GUI for cloning Git repositories hosted at GitHub and also installs the git command line tools.

Linux¶

If you’re using Linux, you hopefully know what you’re doing and can install Git for your distro of choice. A couple of examples:

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install git

Arch Linux:

$ [sudo] pacman -S git

Clone the vi-firmware Repository¶

On Windows or Mac and you installed the GitHub app, open the vi-firmware repository in you browser and click the “Clone in Desktop” button.

If you are using git from the command line, clone it like so:

$ git clone https://github.com/openxc/vi-firmware

Install Vagrant (Recommended for All Platforms)¶

On all platforms, we recommend using the included Vagrant configuration to get compiling as quickly as possible. Vagrant is a tool that helps developers create and use identical development environments. We include a Vagrantfile in the repository that Vagrant uses to create a small Linux virtual machine with all of the vi-firmware dependencies installed. Once installed, you can open a shell in this VM just by running vagrant ssh. The vi-firmware on the host OS (e.g. your Linux, Windows or OS X machine) is shared to the Vagrant VM at the path /vagrant. You can use whatever text editor or IDE you prefer in your native OS, and simply do the compilation from within the VM.

Install VirtualBox.
If using Windows 7 (not required in Windows 8), add the VirtualBox tools to your PATH: PATH=%PATH%;c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox. If you aren’t sure how to edit your PATH, see this guide for all versions of Windows. Log out and back in for the change to take effect.
Install Vagrant.
Navigate to the vi-firmware repository in the GitHub app, click the gear icon in the top right corner and select “Open in Git Shell”.
In the shell, run vagrant up to initialize the Vagrant VM - this may take up to 10 minutes as it downloads and installs a number of dependencies in the VM.
If the initialization completes with no errors, run vagrant ssh to open a shell in the VM.
The vi-firmware directly is shared with the VM in the default home directory. Move into that directory and compile away:

$ cd vi-firmware
~/vi-firmware $ fab reference build

You can edit the source code from your native OS and re-run fab reference build from the Vagrant shell to compile (to compile for the reference VI, for example). Run vagrant suspend to suspend the VM and vagrant up again to restore it - it will be much faster after the first run.

Native Development¶

Don’t want to use Vagrant? There are varying levels of support for compiling in your native OS - see the native development environment docs.