Getting Started: Creating an F´ Project

This tutorial will walk new users through creating a new F´ project.

Tutorial Steps:

• Bootstrapping F´
• Creating a New F´ Project
• Building the New F´ Project
• Conclusion

Bootstrapping F´

An F´ project ties to a specific version of tools to work with F´. In order to create this project and install the correct version of tools, an initial bootstrap version of F´ tools must be installed. This is accomplished with the following command:

pip install fprime-tools

Creating a New F´ Project

Now that to tools are installed a new F´ project should be created. An F´ project internalizes the version of F´ that the project will build upon and provides the user the basic setup for creating, building, and testing components.

In order to make a new project, run the following command and answer the questions as indicated below:

fprime-util new --project

This command will ask for some input. Respond with the following answers:

project_name [MyProject]: MyProject
fprime_branch_or_tag [devel]: devel
Select install_venv:
1 - yes
2 - no
Choose from 1, 2 [1]: 1

Use the default for anything not specified. This command will take a moment to run.

The above command creates a new F´ project structure in a folder called MyProject, use the devel branch of F´ as the basis for the project, and set up the matching tools in a new Virtual Environment.

Experienced F´ users may note that we have not yet created a deployment, but rather just the base project structure.

Building the New F´ Project

The next step is to set up and build the newly created project. This will serve as a build environment for any newly created components, and will build the F´ framework supplied components.

cd MyProject
fprime-util generate
fprime-util build -j4

fprime-util generate sets up the build environment for a project/deployment. It only needs to be done once. At the end of this tutorial, a new deployment will be created and fprime-util generate will also be used then.

Conclusion

A new project has been created with the name MyProject and has been placed in a new folder called in MyProject in the current directory. It includes the initial build system setup, and F´ version. It is still empty in that the user will still need to create components and deployments.

For the remainder of this Getting Started tutorial we should use the tools installed for our project and issue commands within this new project’s folder. Change into the project directory and load the newly install tools with:

cd MyProject
. venv/bin/activate

Next: Getting Started: Creating an F´ Hello World Component