Compiling with CMake

Initialize Configuration with CMake

The first step is to initialize NuttX configuration for a given board, based on a pre-existing configuration. To list all supported configurations you can do:

$ cd nuttx
$ ./tools/configure.sh -L | less

The output is in the format <board name>:<board configuration>. You will see that generally all boards support the nsh configuration which is a good starting point since it enables booting into the interactive command line NuttShell (NSH).

To choose a configuration you pass the <board name>:<board configuration> such as:

$ cd nuttx
$ cmake -B build -DBOARD_CONFIG=stm32f4discovery:nsh -GNinja

The -B build tells what is the build directory.

You can then customize this configuration by using the menu based configuration system with:

$ cd nuttx
$ cmake --build build -t menuconfig

Modifying the configuration is covered in Configuring.

Build NuttX with CMake

We can now build NuttX. To do so, you can simply run:

$ cd nuttx
$ cmake --build build

The build will complete by generating the binary outputs inside build/ directory. Typically this includes the nuttx ELF file (suitable for debugging using gdb) and a nuttx.bin file that can be flashed to the board.

To clean the build, you can do:

$ cmake --build build -t clean