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Building OpenOCD from Sources for MacOS

The following instructions are alternative to downloading binary OpenOCD from Espressif GitHub. To quickly setup the binary OpenOCD, instead of compiling it yourself, backup and proceed to section Setup of OpenOCD.

Download Sources of OpenOCD

The sources for the ESP32-enabled variant of OpenOCD are available from Espressif GitHub under https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32. To download the sources, use the following commands:

cd ~/esp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32.git

The clone of sources should be now saved in ~/esp/openocd-esp32 directory.

Install Dependencies

Install packages that are required to compile OpenOCD using Homebrew:

brew install automake libtool libusb wget [email protected] pkg-config

Build OpenOCD

Proceed with configuring and building OpenOCD:

cd ~/esp/openocd-esp32
./bootstrap
./configure
make

Optionally you can add sudo make install step at the end. Skip it, if you have an existing OpenOCD (from e.g., another development platform), as it may get overwritten.

Note

  • Should an error occur, resolve it and try again until the command make works.

  • Error Unknown command 'raggedright' may indicate that the required version of texinfo was not installed on your computer or installed but was not linked to your PATH. To resolve this issue make sure texinfo is installed and PATH is adjusted prior to the ./bootstrap by running:

    brew install texinfo
    

    export PATH=/usr/local/opt/texinfo/bin:$PATH

  • If there is a submodule problem from OpenOCD, please cd to the openocd-esp32 directory and input git submodule update --init.

  • If the ./configure is successfully run, information of enabled JTAG will be printed under OpenOCD configuration summary.

  • If the information of your device is not shown in the log, use ./configure to enable it as described in ../openocd-esp32/doc/INSTALL.txt.

  • For details concerning compiling OpenOCD, please refer to openocd-esp32/README.OSX.

Once make process is successfully completed, the executable of OpenOCD will be saved in ~/esp/openocd-esp32/src/openocd directory.

Next Steps

To carry on with debugging environment setup, proceed to section Configuring ESP32 Target.