West (Zephyr’s meta-tool)

The Zephyr project includes a swiss-army knife command line tool named west1. West is developed in its own repository.

West’s built-in commands provide a multiple repository management system with features inspired by Google’s Repo tool and Git submodules. West is also “pluggable”: you can write your own west extension commands which add additional features to west. Zephyr uses this to provide conveniences for building applications, flashing and debugging them, and more.

Like git and docker, the top-level west command takes some common options, a sub-command to run, and then options and arguments for that sub-command:

west [common-opts] <command> [opts] <args>

Since west v0.8, you can also run west like this:

python3 -m west [common-opts] <command> [opts] <args>

You can run west --help (or west -h for short) to get top-level help for available west commands, and west <command> -h for detailed help on each command.

The following pages document west’s v0.13.x releases, and provide additional context about the tool.

For details on west’s Python APIs, see West APIs.

Footnotes

1

Zephyr is an English name for the Latin Zephyrus, the ancient Greek god of the west wind.