Readme

This repo contains all the tooling to build and package KiCad for releases.

The builder is composed of PowerShell scripting that allows us to build native Windows logic to handle the build process and breaking it down to steps/functions that can be individually debugged.

Prerequisites

These are the requirements before the repository can be used.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 or newer (IDE or Build Tools)

• Windows 10, Windows Sever 2019 or newer (PowerShell 5.1+ required)

• "Git for Windows" client

Building KiCad

build.ps1 is the sole script that has various switches and args that break down the build process into multiple steps.

Supported Architectures

Currently the following architectures are officially supported:

• x86

• x64

Stubbing is present for:

• arm

• arm64

but they will not build due to dependency issues.

Build Steps

Initialize the builder

This fetches any additional dependency tools we require for building that will be stored within the builder package structure

\build.ps1 -Init

Build Vcpkg

This initializes vcpkg if required and builds the latest required dependencies for KiCad .\build.ps1 -Vcpkg -Latest -Arch x64

Build KiCad

This builds the latest version of KiCad master .\build.ps1 -Build -Latest -Arch x64 -BuildType Release

Package KiCad

.\build.ps1 -Package -Arch x64 -BuildConfigName ${params.BUILD_CONFIG} -Lite -Prepare $True

Extra Functions

Symbols

symbols.ps1 provides management functionality of KiCad’s symbol storage. This is intended for https://symbols.kicad.org and is simply a helper to invoke symstore and agestore to update symbols.

It can be tested locally easily by placing a zip file containing pdbs into a new subfolder, in this example it will be called .artifacts as used by our jenkins process

.\symbols.ps1 -Publish -SourceZipPath \.artifacts\ -SymbolStore <localdiskpathtostorefiles>

Credits

• Brian Sidebotham who started the win-builder long ago in 2015

• Nick Østergaard who took over from Brian and maintained it for many years later and expanding it’s abilities while msys2 was still used

• Mark Roszko who took over and transitioned the project to MSVC builds with enhanced scripting