East is a command line meta-tool, useful for creating, managing, and deploying Zephyr or nRF Connect SDK (NCS) projects.
It is built on top of Zephyr's RTOS meta-tool West and Nordic's nRF Connect Toolchain Manager.
There are several reasons why someone would like to create yet another tool on
top of west:
- Working on several projects at once means using different versions of the NCS repository and different versions of the toolchain. Managing these differences is not a trivial task.
- There is no reproducible build guarantee between the developer's machines. Slight differences between tool versions can manifest into hard-to-find bugs.
- Creating GitHub releases manually takes ages as you have to run the build process for every combination of the board, application, build variant, etc. and properly rename the release binary. The release procedure gets longer with every addition of new hardware and build variation option.
East automates the above tasks and tries to make the developer more productive.
- Automated detection and installation of tooling required for NCS projects.
- Common
westcommands used for the development, such asbuild,flash, etc. - Sandboxed development environment, thanks to the nRF Connect Toolchain
Manager, every
build,flash, etc. command runs inside of its toolchain environment. - Automated process of generating release artefacts for your entire project, no matter the number of applications, samples or boards.
- Support for build types, which is integrated into the usual build process.
- RTT utility commands to connect and see the RTT stream.
docs directory contains several markdown documents about East:
- Getting stared - Quickly setup an example project and get it building with East.
- How East works - How East works under the hood and what to expect from it.
- Configuration - How to configure build types and release procedure via
east.ymlfile. - Development guide - How to setup development environment for working on East.