LibrePCB

About LibrePCB

LibrePCB is a free EDA software to develop printed circuit boards. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. The project is still in a rather early development stage. See Project Status for more information about the currently available features, limitations and known bugs.

Features

Cross-platform (Unix/Linux/BSD/Solaris, macOS, Windows)
Multilingual (both application and library elements)
All-In-One: project management + library/schematic/board editors
Intuitive, modern and easy-to-use graphical user interface
Very powerful library design with some innovative concepts
Human-readable file formats for both libraries and projects
Multi-PCB feature (different PCB variants of the same schematic)
Automatic netlist synchronisation between schematic and board

Installation & Usage

Official stable releases are provided at our download page.

Please read our user manual to see how you can install and use LibrePCB. The Getting Started guide gives you a quick introduction to LibrePCB.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See our Contributing Guide for details.

For internal details take a look at the automatically generated documentation (doxygen)

Development

WARNING: The master branch always contains the latest UNSTABLE version of LibrePCB. Everything you do with this unstable version could break your workspace, libraries or projects, so you should not use it productively! For productive use, please install an official release as described in the user manual. For development, please read details here.

Instead of building LibrePCB manually, Arch Linux users could install the package librepcb-git from the AUR. The package clones and builds the latest (unstable!) version of the master branch from GitHub.

Requirements

To compile LibrePCB, you need the following software components:

g++ >= 4.8, MinGW >= 4.8, or Clang >= 3.3 (C++11 support is required)
Qt >= 5.2
zlib
OpenSSL

Prepared Docker Image

Instead of installing the dependencies manually on your system (see instructions below), you can also use one of our Docker images with all dependencies pre-installed (except GUI tools like QtCreator). These images are actually used for CI, but are also useful to build LibrePCB locally.

Installation on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint

sudo apt-get install git build-essential qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools libglu1-mesa-dev openssl zlib1g zlib1g-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5svg5-dev
sudo apt-get install qt5-doc qtcreator # optional

Installation on Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S git base-devel qt5-base qt5-svg qt5-tools desktop-file-utils shared-mime-info openssl zlib
sudo pacman -S qt5-doc qtcreator # optional

Installation on Mac OS X

Install Xcode through the app store and start it at least once (for the license)
Install homebrew (the package manager)
Install qt5: brew update && brew install qt5
Make the toolchain available: brew unlink qt && brew link --force qt5

Installation on Windows

Download and run the Qt for Windows (MinGW) installer from here. LibrePCB does not compile with MSVC, so you must install following components with the Qt installer:

The MinGW compiler itself
The Qt libraries for MinGW

Cloning

It's important to clone the repository recursively to get all submodules too:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/LibrePCB/LibrePCB.git && cd LibrePCB

Updating

When updating the repository, make sure to also update all the submodules recursively. Otherwise you may get strange compilation errors:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building

You can either build LibrePCB using Qt Creator, or you can build on the command line using qmake. To build a debug version of LibrePCB with qmake/make:

mkdir build && cd build
qmake -r ../librepcb.pro CONFIG+=debug
make -j8

For more detailed instructions (including how to set up Qt Creator), see https://developers.librepcb.org/d5/d96/doc_building.html

Credits

First of all, many thanks to all of our contributors!
Thanks also to cloudscale.ch for sponsoring our API server!

License

LibrePCB is published under the GNU GPLv3 license.

dick7/LibrePCB