The build setup and steps in this guide change frequently, and are updated as needed. If you are are having trouble, check this page, which highlights recent changes, to see if you need to update your build environment. The changes mentioned here are also documented in the other pages in this guide.

Install git-lfs

git-lfs is now a required prerequisite, as of CircuitPython 8.1.0. The submodules in the silabs port require it.

Fetching Submodules

Submodules should be fetched using the Makefile targets fetch-all-submodules,  which is in the top-level Makefile, or fetch-port-submodules, which is used from port-specific Makefiles. If you use standard git commands for fetching submodules, you will end up fetching many gigabytes of unnecessary versions.

See this page section for more details.

These make targets do either a partial "blobless" clone of all submodules, if your version of git supports it, or else does a shallow depth 1 clone.

make remove-all-submodules removes all submodules and cleans up, so you can do a fresh make fetch-all-submodules or fetch-port-submodules. Use make remove-all-submodules if you are getting errors when fetching submodules.

These Makefile targets were added June 6, 2023, changing a previous target, added in late March, 2023 that only fetched all modules, make fetch-submodules.