Deprecated:: See Setup Guide on the RIOT Guide Site for the latest information. This section will be removed after release 2025.11.

The build system

Deprecated:: See The Build System on the RIOT Guide Site for the latest information. This section will be removed after release 2025.11.

Building and executing an example

Deprecated:: See Building and executing an example on the RIOT Guide Site for the latest information. This section will be removed after release 2025.11.

Configuring an application

Many modules in RIOT offer configuration options that will be considered during compile-time.They are modeled as macros that can be overridden by the user. Currently there are two ways of doing this: using CFLAGS or via Kconfig (the last one is currently only possible for a subset of modules).

For instructions on how to configure via CFLAGS check the identified compile-time configurations. To learn how to use Kconfig in RIOT, please refer to the User's guide to configure with Kconfig.

Default configurations

When devices have a common access interface, having a default configuration to enable them across platforms, without having to explicitly specify which modules to include, comes in handy. For this, two pseudomodules are defined:

saul_default: will enable all the drivers of sensors and actuators that are present in the target platform.
netdev_default: will enable all the drivers of network devices present in the target platform.

Use Docker to build RIOT

Deprecated:: See Setup Guide or Build in Docker on the RIOT Guide Site for the latest information. This section will be removed after release 2025.11.

Generating compile_commands.json e.g. for code completion in IDEs

See Setup Guide for a guide on how to set up VS Code for RIOT development using the compile_commands.json file.

This target will honor the variables controlling the build process such as BOARD, TOOLCHAIN, DEVELHELP, etc. just like the usual build process. This works without actual compilation. By default, the compile_commands.json is placed in the RIOT base directory. This behavior can be overwritten using the COMPILE_COMMANDS_PATH variable by specifying the full absolute path (including file name) of the compile_commands.json instead.

Note: By default, the built-in include search directories of GCC will be explicitly added and flags incompatible with clangd will be dropped. This will allow using clangd as language server out of the box. If this is not desired, run export COMPILE_COMMANDS_FLAGS="" to turn modification of the compile commands off. For a list of available flags, run ./dist/tools/compile_commands/compile_commands.py --help in the RIOT base directory.

Using the native port with networking

If you compile RIOT for the native cpu and include the netdev_tap module, you can specify a network interface like this: PORT=tap0 make term

Setting up a tap network

There is a shell script in RIOT/dist/tools/tapsetup called tapsetup which you can use to create a network of tap interfaces.

USAGE

To create a bridge and two (or count at your option) tap interfaces:

sudo ./dist/tools/tapsetup/tapsetup [-c [<count>]]

A detailed example can be found in examples/networking/gnrc/gnrc_networking.