The code for the board package tool lives in the Adafruit arduino-board-index repository and consists of bpt.py & bpt_model.py.  The scripts are written in Python and require Python 3.4 or later.

The pip package manager is included with Python 3.4 or later. You need to install these packages using pip

• click
• gitpython

You can install these libraries by running the following command:

pip3 install --user click gitpython

pip3 install --user click gitpython

Finally you will need to make sure you install the git command line tools (not a graphical interface tool like gitorious, TortoiseGit, etc.--you need the git command line tools for use with the gitpython library).  When installing the command line tools make sure to check any installer option to add the git tools to your system path.

After installing all the dependencies you should test that you can run the bpt.py script.  First clone the repository with bpt.py by running a command like:

git clone https://github.com/adafruit/arduino-board-index.git

git clone https://github.com/adafruit/arduino-board-index.git

Navigate inside the cloned repository directory and run the following command to run the script with the --help option (on Windows, you need to say python instead of python3):

python3 bpt.py --help

python3 bpt.py --help

You should see a description like the following:

If you see an error go back and make sure all of the dependencies above were installed and try again.

Once the dependencies are installed and you've verified the script runs you're ready to go through the workflow of updating an Arduino package.  Continue on to the next page to learn how to update Adafruit's Arduino board packages.