Starting a new Zephyr project using West

Zephyr and its package manager West are getting a lot of attention these days. Unfortunately the rapid pace of software development isn't always matched with documentation and West in particular is pretty obscure.

When starting a new project, I tend to set-up the environment first with a "Hello World" type example and then write software from there. With this in mind, here's a minimal west.yaml file that you can use to build your project on top of, but separate from, Zephyr:

manifest:

  version: "0.13"

  remotes:

    - name: FOO

      url-base: https://github.com/FOO

    - name: zephyrproject

      url-base: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos

  defaults:

    remote: FOO

  projects:

    - name: zephyr

      remote: zephyrproject

      path: zephyr

      west-commands: scripts/west-commands.yml

      revision: main

  self:

    path: BAR

1. Copy & paste the above into a west.yaml file in the root of your FOO/BAR repository
2. Copy a Zephyr sample from https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/tree/main/samples into the root of your FOO/BAR repository. I use hello_world.
3. Install west - see any number of web tutorials about how to do this
4. Create an empty directory somewhere and cd into it
5. Run west init -m https://github.com/FOO/BAR
6. Run west update
7. Run west build BAR to build the sample which is now completely detached from Zephyr