ESP-IDF setup on macOS

By Bjørn Borud , 2022-05-20

This is compact set of instructions to thet the ESP-IDF tools up and running on your mac. These notes are mostly for myself.

Prerequisites

brew install cmake ninja dfu-util python3

Get ESP-IDF

You probably want to get a specific version. In this example we get v4.4.2. If you want to get a different version, you should have a look at https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/releases and pick the release you want.

mkdir -p ~/esp
cd ~/esp
git clone -b v4.4.2 --recursive <https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf.git> esp-idf

Install the tooling

This will install the tooling into $HOME/.espressif.

cd ~/esp/esp-idf
./install.sh all

Using the installed tooling

Once the tooling is installed you need to set up the environment variables.

. ./esp/esp-idf/export.sh

To make this a bit easier to remember, add the following to your .bash_profile or similar:

alias idf='. $HOME/esp/esp-idf/export.sh'

Then just type idf in the shell whenever you want the environment to be populated correctly for ESP-IDF development.