espflash/cargo-espflash

cargo-espflash

Cross-compiler and Cargo extension for flashing Espressif devices over serial.

Supports the ESP32, ESP32-C2/C3/C6, ESP32-S2/S3, ESP32-H2 and ESP8266.

Installation

If you are installing cargo-espflash from source (ie. using cargo install) then you must have rustc>=1.65.0 installed on your system.

If you are running macOS or Linux then libuv must also be installed; this is available via most popular package managers. If you are running Windows you can ignore this step.

# macOS
brew install libuv
# Debian/Ubuntu/etc.
apt-get install libuv-dev
# Fedora
dnf install systemd-devel

To install:

cargo install cargo-espflash

Alternatively, you can use cargo-binstall to download pre-compiled artifacts from the releases and use them instead:

cargo binstall cargo-espflash

If you would like to flash from a Raspberry Pi using the built-in UART peripheral, you can enable the raspberry feature (note that this is not available if using cargo-binstall):

cargo install cargo-espflash --features=raspberry

Usage

Cargo subcommand for flashing Espressif devices over serial

Usage: cargo espflash <COMMAND>

Commands:
  board-info       Display information about the connected board and exit without flashing
  completions      Generate completions for the given shell. Resulting completions have to be appended to cargo's completions
  flash            Flash an application to a target device
  monitor          Open the serial monitor without flashing
  partition-table  Operations for partitions tables
  save-image       Save the image to disk instead of flashing to device
  help             Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help information
  -V, --version  Print version information

Note

Permissions on Linux

In Linux, when using any of the commands that requires using a serial port, the current user may not have access to serial ports and a “Permission Denied” or “Port doesn’t exist” errors may appear. On most Linux distributions, the solution is to add the user to the dialout group (check e.g. ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0 to find the group) with a command like sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER. You can call su - $USER to enable read and write permissions for the serial port without having to log out and back in again. Check your Linux distribution’s documentation for more information.

Bootloader and Partition Table

cargo-espflash is able to detect if the package being built and flashed depends on esp-idf-sys; if it does, then the bootloader and partition table built by the esp-idf-sys build script will be used, otherwise the bundled bootloader and partition tables will be used instead.

If the --bootloader and/or --partition-table options are provided then these will be used regardless of whether or not the package depends on esp-idf-sys.

Package Metadata

You're able to specify paths to bootloader and partition table files ands image format in your package's Cargo metadata for per-project configuration:

[package.metadata.espflash]
bootloader      = "bootloader.bin" # Must be a binary file
partition_table = "partitions.csv" # Supports CSV and binary formats
format          = "direct-boot"    # Can be 'esp-bootloader' or 'direct-boot'

Configuration

It's possible to specify a serial port and/or USB VID/PID values by setting them in a configuration file. The location of this file differs based on your operating system:

Operating System	Configuration Path
Linux	$HOME/.config/espflash/espflash.toml
macOS	$HOME/Library/Application Support/rs.esp.espflash/espflash.toml
Windows	%APPDATA%\esp\espflash\espflash.toml

Configuration examples

You can either configure the serial port name like so:

[connection]
serial = "/dev/ttyUSB0"

Or specify one or more USB vid/pid couple:

[[usb_device]]
vid = "303a"
pid = "1001"

Windows Subsystem for Linux

It is not currently possible to use cargo-espflash from within WSL1.

It is not possible to flash chips using the built-in USB_SERIAL_JTAG when using WSL2, because the reset also resets USB_SERIAL_JTAG peripheral which then disconnects the chip from WSL2. Chips can be flashed via UART using WSL2, however.

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.