esp-idf/docs/make-project.rst

Build and Flash with Make
=========================

Finding a project
-----------------

As well as the `esp-idf-template <https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf-template>`_ project mentioned in the setup guide, esp-idf comes with some example projects on github in the `examples <https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples>`_ directory.

Once you've found the project you want to work with, change to its directory and you can configure and build it:

Configuring your project
------------------------

`make menuconfig`

Compiling your project
----------------------

`make all`

... will compile app, bootloader and generate a partition table based on the config.

Flashing your project
---------------------

When `make all` finishes, it will print a command line to use esptool.py to flash the chip. However you can also do this from make by running:

`make flash`

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 `make menuconfig`.

You don't need to run `make all` before running `make flash`, `make flash` will automatically rebuild anything which needs it.

Compiling & Flashing Just the App
---------------------------------

After the initial flash, you may just want to build and flash just your app, not the bootloader and partition table:

* `make app` - build just the app.
* `make app-flash` - flash just the app.

`make app-flash` will automatically rebuild the app if it needs it.

(There's no downside to reflashing the bootloader and partition table each time, if they haven't changed.)

The Partition Table
-------------------

Once you've compiled your project, the "build" directory will contain a binary file with a name like "my_app.bin". This is an ESP32 image binary that can be loaded by the bootloader.

A single ESP32's flash can contain multiple apps, as well as many different kinds of data (calibration data, filesystems, parameter storage, etc). For this reason a partition table is flashed to offset 0x4000 in the flash.

Each entry in the partition table has a name (label), type (app, data, or something else), subtype and the offset in flash where the partition is loaded.

The simplest way to use the partition table is to `make menuconfig` and choose one of the simple predefined partition tables:

* "Single factory app, no OTA"
* "Factory app, two OTA definitions"

In both cases the factory app is flashed at offset 0x10000. If you `make partition_table` then it will print a summary of the partition table.

For more details about :doc:`partition tables <partition-tables>` and how to create custom variations, view the :doc:`documentation <partition-tables>`.