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Riot Documentation

The Build System

RIOT uses GNU make as build system. The simplest way to compile and link an application with RIOT, is to set up a Makefile providing at least the following variables:

  • APPLICATION: should contain the (unique) name of your application
  • BOARD: specifies the platform the application should be built for by default
  • RIOTBASE: specifies the path to your copy of the RIOT repository (note, that you may want to use $(CURDIR) here, to give a relative path)

Additionally it has to include the Makefile.include, located in RIOT’s root directory:

a minimal application Makefile
APPLICATION = mini-makefile
BOARD ?= native
RIOTBASE ?= $(CURDIR)/../RIOT


include $(RIOTBASE)/Makefile.include

You can use Make’s ?= operator in order to allow overwriting variables from the command line. For example, you can easily specify the target platform, using the sample Makefile, by invoking make like this:

Terminal window
make BOARD=iotlab-m3

Besides typical targets like clean, all, or doc, RIOT provides the special targets flash and term to invoke the configured flashing and terminal tools for the specified platform. These targets use the variable PORT for the serial communication to the device. Neither this variable nor the targets flash and term are mandatory for the native port.

For the native port, PORT has a special meaning: it is used to identify the tap interface if the netdev_tap module is used. The target debug can be used to invoke a debugger on some platforms. For the native port the additional targets such as all-valgrind and valgrind exist. Refer to cpu/native/README.md for additional information

Some RIOT directories contain special Makefiles like Makefile.base, Makefile.include or Makefile.dep. The first one can be included into other Makefiles to define some standard targets. The files called Makefile.include are used in boards and cpu to append target specific information to variables like INCLUDES, setting the include paths. Makefile.dep serves to define dependencies.

Unless specified otherwise, make will create an elf-file as well as an Intel hex file in the bin folder of your application directory.

Learn more about the build system in the Wiki