Please see the
End-of-Life Advisories
for information about ESP-IDF releases with discontinued support.
ESP-IDF Release and SoC Compatibility
The following table shows ESP-IDF support of Espressif SoCs where
and
denote preview status and support, respectively. The preview support is usually limited in time and intended for beta versions of chips. Please use an ESP-IDF release where the desired SoC is already supported.
Espressif SoCs released before 2016 (ESP8266 and ESP8285) are supported by
RTOS SDK
instead.
Developing With ESP-IDF
Setting Up ESP-IDF
See
https://idf.espressif.com/
for links to detailed instructions on how to set up the ESP-IDF depending on chip you use.
Note:
Each SoC series and each ESP-IDF release has its own documentation. Please see Section
Versions
on how to find documentation and how to checkout specific release of ESP-IDF.
Non-GitHub forks
ESP-IDF uses relative locations as its submodules URLs (
.gitmodules
). So they link to GitHub. If ESP-IDF is forked to a Git repository which is not on GitHub, you will need to run the script
tools/set-submodules-to-github.sh
after git clone.
The script sets absolute URLs for all submodules, allowing
git submodule update --init --recursive
to complete. If cloning ESP-IDF from GitHub, this step is not needed.
Finding a Project
As well as the
esp-idf-template
project mentioned in Getting Started, ESP-IDF comes with some example projects in the
examples
directory.
Once you've found the project you want to work with, change to its directory and you can configure and build it.
To start your own project based on an example, copy the example project directory outside of the ESP-IDF directory.
Quick Reference
See the Getting Started guide links above for a detailed setup guide. This is a quick reference for common commands when working with ESP-IDF projects:
Setup Build Environment
(See the Getting Started guide listed above for a full list of required steps with more details.)
Install host build dependencies mentioned in the Getting Started guide.
Run the install script to set up the build environment. The options include
install.bat
or
install.ps1
for Windows, and
install.sh
or
install.fish
for Unix shells.
Run the export script on Windows (
export.bat
) or source it on Unix (
source export.sh
) in every shell environment before using ESP-IDF.
Configuring the Project
idf.py set-target <chip_name>
sets the target of the project to
<chip_name>
. Run
idf.py set-target
without any arguments to see a list of supported targets.
idf.py menuconfig
opens a text-based configuration menu where you can configure the project.
Compiling the Project
idf.py build
... will compile app, bootloader and generate a partition table based on the config.
Flashing the Project
When the build finishes, it will print a command line to use esptool.py to flash the chip. However you can also do this automatically by running:
idf.py -p PORT flash
Replace PORT with the name of your serial port (like
COM3
on Windows,
/dev/ttyUSB0
on Linux, or
/dev/cu.usbserial-X
on MacOS. If the
-p
option is left out,
idf.py flash
will try to flash the first available serial port.
This will flash the entire project (app, bootloader and partition table) to a new chip. The settings for serial port flashing can be configured with
idf.py menuconfig
.
You don't need to run
idf.py build
before running
idf.py flash
,
idf.py flash
will automatically rebuild anything which needs it.
To build, flash and monitor output in one pass, you can run:
idf.py flash monitor
Compiling & Flashing Only the App
After the initial flash, you may just want to build and flash just your app, not the bootloader and partition table:
idf.py app
- build just the app.
idf.py app-flash
- flash just the app.
idf.py app-flash
will automatically rebuild the app if any source files have changed.
(In normal development there's no downside to reflashing the bootloader and partition table each time, if they haven't changed.)
Erasing Flash
The
idf.py flash
target does not erase the entire flash contents. However it is sometimes useful to set the device back to a totally erased state, particularly when making partition table changes or OTA app updates. To erase the entire flash, run
idf.py erase-flash
.
This can be combined with other targets, ie
idf.py -p PORT erase-flash flash
will erase everything and then re-flash the new app, bootloader and partition table.
