West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

Sigurd Hellesvik — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 11:49:37 GMT

[quote user="CurtisHx2"]- Use nrfutil toolchain-manager to install the desired toolchain. [/quote]

Try to Start toolchain environment. With this, nrfutil toolchain-manager should set up the environment for you.

Alterativley, you can install the SDK and toolchain manually, following the System-wide installation.

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

CurtisHx2 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:09:21 GMT

That is what I started with, and I ran into a few different problems with getting the environment properly setup outside of VSCode. I think I have a viable path forward. This is mainly for anyone else who's trying to do something similar.

The environment is Windows 10/11, using the Zephyr Workspace structure, with the latest version of nRF Connect (3.0.99) and nRF Connect SDK Toolchain V3.0.2. We're using Azure hosted build agents, which are created and destroyed for each run. There's no persistent environment. It has to be setup on every run.

There's a few steps that need to be run in order to mimic the build environment provided by the nRF Connect VSCode Plugin. A python virtual environment should probably be used.

- Install python requirements in <west workspace>/zephyr/scripts/requirements.txt

- Install python requirements in <west workspace>/nrf/scripts/requirements.txt

- Use nrfutil toolchain-manager to install the desired toolchain.

The last part is going to require some work. Inside of the toolchain folder (eg. C:\ncs\toolchains\0b393f9e1b), there is an environment.json file. This file lists the environment variables that need to be setup and how they need to be setup (eg. append, overwrite, etc). I couldn't find an off the shelf tool, but it shouldn't be too difficult to make a Python script that can do it.

Edit: The main reason why I'm taking this route is it lets us use Azure hosted agents, it keeps the CI/CD environment extremely close to the developer environment, and it lets developers use the nRF Connect plugin and its GUI tools. We have a project with a different structure that doesn't work with the nRF Connect plugin.

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

Sigurd Hellesvik — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:28:52 GMT

[quote user="CurtisHx2"]At the very high level, I think I need a command line equivalent of the "Add Build Configuration" wizard in the nRF Connect VSCode plugin. The reason for that is most (all?) of my team is going to be using the nRF Connect plugin for development work, and I want the CI/CD environment to be consistent with the developer environment I looked around to see if something like that exists and I couldn't find anything.[/quote]

The VS Code extension just uses "west" under the hood, so you can use "west" command all the same.

Here you can see the exact command that VS COde uses when you click build:

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

CurtisHx2 — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 17:43:32 GMT

Hi Sigurd,

I read through those links (thank you) and did some more work today with setting up a CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps.

At the very high level, I think I need a command line equivalent of the "Add Build Configuration" wizard in the nRF Connect VSCode plugin. The reason for that is most (all?) of my team is going to be using the nRF Connect plugin for development work, and I want the CI/CD environment to be consistent with the developer environment I looked around to see if something like that exists and I couldn't find anything.

Is there a way to get verbose output from the "Add Build Configuration" wizard? I'd like to see how it sets up and configures the SDK and toolchain settings.

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

Sigurd Hellesvik — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 14:11:40 GMT

Hi,

We make the nRF Connect SDK mainly to be used as a desktop experience. Therefore, support for developing using CI/CD is a bit limited. That said, this is what I got:

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/docker-image

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/wiki/Continuous-Integration

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/develop/application/index.html

(archived) https://github.com/NordicPlayground/nrf-docker

I hope these can be helpful. And let me know if you have any follow-up questions after checking those out

Regards,
Sigurd Hellesvik

RE: West silently failing to clone repo in Azure DevOps Pipeline

CurtisHx2 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:55:22 GMT

Looks like I screwed up with my analysis of what was going on. West is pulling down the project with west init. I was mis-reading the logs.

I would still like to know if there's any general guidelines for using nRF Connect in a CI/CD system.