Change board package folder for shared access

[pstachel]

Hello,

The board package folder under Windows is:
c:\Users\UserNameXYZ\AppData\Local\Arduino15.
Is there any way to change this location outside the User profile?

In particular, we use Arduino at school. Each student must install the toolchain for the boards, which is a waste of profile memory.
Also the new UNO R4 board toolchain is bigger than the students quota - so we can not use at the moment.
What I am looking for is an option to install the board packages under e.g. c:\arduino\packages\ - this will be maintained by the Admin and the students can work right away with boards and packages.

Any ideas?
How do you solve this at your institution?

Thank you in advance.
Philipp

[ptillisch]

Hi @pstachel. The path of this folder is configured via the directories.data field of the configuration file at the following location:

C:\Users\<username>\.arduinoIDE\arduino-cli.yaml

(where <username> is the Windows username)

You can edit the file in any text editor. This file can be generated and the data in the file adjusted using the arduino-cli config commands:

https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/commands/arduino-cli_config/

arduino-cli.yaml is written in the common YAML language. This means that, in case you find arduino-cli config to not be suitable or convenient for your application, you can also use any of the many general purpose tools available for working with data in this format. I can recommend the excellent yq:

yq

[pstachel]

Thank you @ptillisch for this fast response!

This works fine for my PC with admin rights.
We will check at the school, if this solution works also for student accounts without write permission in that pre-installed folder. (I saw that there are also json-index files created.)

Regards,
Philipp

[ptillisch]

You are welcome. I'm glad if I was able to be of assistance.

Regards,
Per