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Built-in commands

This page describes west’s built-in commands, some of which were introduced in Basics, in more detail.

Some commands are related to Git commands with the same name, but operate on the entire workspace. For example, west diff shows local changes in multiple Git repositories in the workspace.

Some commands take projects as arguments. These arguments can be project names as specified in the manifest file, or (as a fallback) paths to them on the local file system. Omitting project arguments to commands which accept them (such as west list, west forall, etc.) usually defaults to using all projects in the manifest file plus the manifest repository itself.

For additional help, run west <command> -h (e.g. west init -h).

west init

This command creates a west workspace. It can be used in two ways:

  1. Cloning a new manifest repository from a remote URL

  2. Creating a workspace around an existing local manifest repository

Option 1: to clone a new manifest repository from a remote URL, use:

west init [-m URL] [--mr REVISION] [--mf FILE] [directory]

The new workspace is created in the given directory, creating a new .west inside this directory. You can give the manifest URL using the -m switch, the initial revision to check out using --mr, and the location of the manifest file within the repository using --mf.

For example, running:

west init -m https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr --mr v1.14.0 zp

would clone the upstream official zephyr repository into zp/zephyr, and check out the v1.14.0 release. This command creates zp/.west, and set the manifest.path configuration option to zephyr to record the location of the manifest repository in the workspace. The default manifest file location is used.

The -m option defaults to https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr. The --mf option defaults to west.yml. Since west v0.10.1, west will use the default branch in the manifest repository unless the --mr option is used to override it. (In prior versions, --mr defaulted to master.)

If no directory is given, the current working directory is used.

Option 2: to create a workspace around an existing local manifest repository, use:

west init -l [--mf FILE] directory

This creates .west next to directory in the file system, and sets manifest.path to directory.

As above, --mf defaults to west.yml.

Reconfiguring the workspace:

If you change your mind later, you are free to change manifest.path and manifest.file using west config after running west init. Just be sure to run west update afterwards to update your workspace to match the new manifest file.

west update

west update [-f {always,smart}] [-k] [-r]
            [--group-filter FILTER] [--stats] [PROJECT ...]

Which projects are updated:

By default, this command parses the manifest file, usually west.yml, and updates each project specified there. If your manifest uses project groups, then only the active projects are updated.

To operate on a subset of projects only, give PROJECT argument(s). Each PROJECT is either a project name as given in the manifest file, or a path that points to the project within the workspace. If you specify projects explicitly, they are updated regardless of whether they are active.

Project update procedure:

For each project that is updated, this command:

  1. Initializes a local Git repository for the project in the workspace, if it does not already exist

  2. Inspects the project’s revision field in the manifest, and fetches it from the remote if it is not already available locally

  3. Sets the project’s manifest-rev branch to the commit specified by the revision in the previous step

  4. Checks out manifest-rev in the local working copy as a detached HEAD

  5. If the manifest file specifies a submodules key for the project, recursively updates the project’s submodules as described below.

To avoid unnecessary fetches, west update will not fetch project revision values which are Git SHAs or tags that are already available locally. This is the behavior when the -f (--fetch) option has its default value, smart. To force this command to fetch from project remotes even if the revisions appear to be available locally, either use -f always or set the update.fetch configuration option to always. SHAs may be given as unique prefixes as long as they are acceptable to Git 1.

If the project revision is a Git ref that is neither a tag nor a SHA (i.e. if the project is tracking a branch), west update always fetches, regardless of -f and update.fetch.

Some branch names might look like short SHAs, like deadbeef. West treats these like SHAs. You can disambiguate by prefixing the revision value with refs/heads/, e.g. revision: refs/heads/deadbeef.

For safety, west update uses git checkout --detach to check out a detached HEAD at the manifest revision for each updated project, leaving behind any branches which were already checked out. This is typically a safe operation that will not modify any of your local branches.

However, if you had added some local commits onto a previously detached HEAD checked out by west, then git will warn you that you’ve left behind some commits which are no longer referred to by any branch. These may be garbage-collected and lost at some point in the future. To avoid this if you have local commits in the project, make sure you have a local branch checked out before running west update.

If you would rather rebase any locally checked out branches instead, use the -r (--rebase) option.

If you would like west update to keep local branches checked out as long as they point to commits that are descendants of the new manifest-rev, use the -k (--keep-descendants) option.

Note

west update --rebase will fail in projects that have git conflicts between your branch and new commits brought in by the manifest. You should immediately resolve these conflicts as you usually do with git, or you can use git -C <project_path> rebase --abort to ignore incoming changes for the moment.

With a clean working tree, a plain west update never fails because it does not try to hold on to your commits and simply leaves them aside.

west update --keep-descendants offers an intermediate option that never fails either but does not treat all projects the same:

  • in projects where your branch diverged from the incoming commits, it does not even try to rebase and leaves your branches behind just like a plain west update does;

  • in all other projects where no rebase or merge is needed it keeps your branches in place.

One-time project group manipulation:

The --group-filter option can be used to change which project groups are enabled or disabled for the duration of a single west update command. See Project Groups and Active Projects for details on the project group feature.

The west update command behaves as if the --group-filter option’s value were appended to the manifest.group-filter configuration option.

For example, running west update --group-filter=+foo,-bar would behave the same way as if you had temporarily appended the string "+foo,-bar" to the value of manifest.group-filter, run west update, then restored manifest.group-filter to its original value.

Note that using the syntax --group-filter=VALUE instead of --group-filter VALUE avoids issues parsing command line options if you just want to disable a single group, e.g. --group-filter=-bar.

Submodule update procedure:

If a project in the manifest has a submodules key, the submodules are updated as follows, depending on the value of the submodules key.

If the project has submodules: true, west first synchronizes the project’s submodules with:

git submodule sync --recursive

West then runs one of the following in the project repository, depending on whether you run west update with the --rebase option or without it:

# without --rebase, e.g. "west update":
git submodule update --init --checkout --recursive

# with --rebase, e.g. "west update --rebase":
git submodule update --init --rebase --recursive

Otherwise, the project has submodules: <list-of-submodules>. In this case, west synchronizes the project’s submodules with:

git submodule sync --recursive -- <submodule-path>

Then it updates each submodule in the list as follows, depending on whether you run west update with the --rebase option or without it:

# without --rebase, e.g. "west update":
git submodule update --init --checkout --recursive <submodule-path>

# with --rebase, e.g. "west update --rebase":
git submodule update --init --rebase --recursive <submodule-path>

The git submodule sync commands are skipped if the update.sync-submodules Configuration option is false.

Other project commands

West has a few more commands for managing the projects in the workspace, which are summarized here. Run west <command> -h for detailed help.

  • west list: print a line of information about each project in the manifest, according to a format string

  • west manifest: manage the manifest file. See Manifest Command.

  • west diff: run git diff in local project repositories

  • west status: run git status in local project repositories

  • west forall: run an arbitrary command in local project repositories

Other built-in commands

Finally, here is a summary of other built-in commands.

  • west config: get or set configuration options

  • west topdir: print the top level directory of the west workspace

  • west help: get help about a command, or print information about all commands in the workspace, including Extensions

Footnotes

1

West may fetch all refs from the Git server when given a SHA as a revision. This is because some Git servers have historically not allowed fetching SHAs directly.