How to compile Arduino ESP8266/32 on CI/CD (CLI shell cmd) platform?

Question

Like make for not ESP Arduino target, is there a CLI command like esptool.py to upload in the hardware ?

I've seen makeEspArduino but seems to be not trivial ?

What about espressif ESP32 component ?

Is Visual Micro Arduino CLI (Command Line Interface) tool mature ?

• Craig: Have you looked at github.com/arduino/arduino-builder/wiki/…
• E.Racineux: Thanx Craig. I'll have a deep look...

Answer 1

Easiest answer: Use PlatformIO. (Yes this answer is technically an advertisement, but it is the correct solution here.).

Why not the others?

• makeEspArduino is dependent on GNU make, hard to make modification to, hard to get support for when something goes wrong
• Visual Micro Arduino is Visual Studio extension, thus native to Windows

Why PlatformIO?

On the other hand, PIO is just a framework written in python2, runs on Windows, Mac & Linux alike and supports tons of boards and frameworks. Not only is it OS-agnostic but it also IDE agnostic. It exports project files for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, CLion, Visual Studio, Sublime, Atom and other IDEs. The Arduino IDE will always be only a (bad) syntax highlighter.

Support boards (479 of them) range from Arduino Unos to ESP8266/ESP32 over to STM32 and nRF boards. It's also possible to compile one firmware for different environments (board), so with a well-written firmware, PIO can generate firmwares for multiple boards and frameworks alike. Frameworks include Arduino cores, ESP-IDF, STM32HAL and more.

To create a new project, you'd do

user@somefolder/$ pio init --board=nodemcuv2 --ide=vscode

To compile from CLI, you just have to execute the run target:

user@somefolder/$ pio run 

To upload you'd just

user@somefolder/$ pio run -t upload 

With optional --upload-port=/dev/ttyUSB0 or alike. Updating wirelessly over ArduinoOTA is also supported.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIkGTwLOD7o

Documentation: http://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/

• E.Racineux: Thanx a lot Maximilian Gerhardt for this complete answer