IDE 1.6.4 Board Manager external URL json/package

Re: Boards manager additional URLs

Is there any guide or some further information on this topic yet? I understand that this feature was somewhat shoehorned in for this release, but as there are already efforts to collect third party URLs and requests by the general public to support this new feature, it would be nice to know exactly what information can/should/must be represented in the JSON file, what information goes where in the archive file (and what archive formats are supported - I see at least zip and tar.bzip), and what some limitations are.

For example, when I first tried testing this, the Arduino IDE kept suggesting that it could not download the .json file at all - even though the file was readily accessible. Moving it over to github solved the issue - but I don't know if that was an http vs https issue or some other cause. At some point I even managed to get the Arduino IDE to fail to start up (splash screen would appear and disappear).

For the record, I did check the following for information:

To no particular avail. If I have completely missed a page describing these, feel free to hit me with a cluebat. If trawling through the source code is the way to go, that's also somewhat acceptable :slight_smile:

As an aside: will the library manager get much the same overhaul? I noticed one of the examples has its libraries (and example files, etc.) included in its Board Manager package; I haven't checked if that works, but if it does.. is that the way we should be doing it, or should we still manually submit libraries for inclusion in the crawler?

Thank you.

I looked around for a tutorial and couldn't find one so I made an attempt at creating one:
http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/BoardsManagerSupport
Any contributions, corrections, or feedback are welcome.

I jumped the gun! Cristian Maglie published an excellent documentation of the format today:

Well, that link behaves weirdly. It seems to work from the github Arduino wiki page, but not elsewhere...

NOW this gets published! I just spent the last couple of days getting optiboot to use this stuff, using a lot of trial and error. I did come up with a nice script (unix shell script) for generating a "release", that might be useful as a starting point for other people.) optiboot/release.sh at master · Optiboot/optiboot · GitHub

Great work westfw! I think that script will be very useful to people. I have been thinking it would be nice to have a hubot script or something for creating the archive with the correct folder structure for Boards Manager install but you automated the entire process.

westfw, a couple things you might want to consider about your JSON index file template:

  • From the specification:

category: this field is reserved, a 3rd party core must set it to Contributed

  • With some projects not having a tools section has caused an issue when adding multiple Boards Manager URLs under Arduino 1.6.4, however I checked and the problem doesn't happen with your optiboot 6.2 JSON file and the problem with the IDE has been fixed. I haven't been able to figure out why some work without tools and others don't.