I am trying to install the SDK and whilst I can get to the point of installing v3.2.0 or v3.2.1 the installation fails with Failed to read toolchain environment

[simonp119]

I have done a clean install of the SDK on Debian 13 

I have nrfutil install and its working fine - i have tried installing both the v3.2.1 and v3.2.0 toolchains and in both cases I can not complete the installation nor start the toolchain as I get this error:

Failed to read toolchain environment - it is a zero length file with nothing in it - so I am no surprised it is not parseable by json!!

I have been using nRF52840s for a while as I have built my own OTBR thread border routers which run about 70 child devices and all of my heating!!!

I had not previously had to use the tool-chain instead I used nrfjprog which is marked as deprecated. 

So I have no experience of the new toolchain and I am unable to find out what is supposed to be in the environment file that would allow it to start. 

Please could you tell me what I am missing? I apologise if it is something obvious - I believe I have followed the installation instructions completely (I am doing a command line install)

Thanks, and hoping you had an excellent Christmas

Simon

[Vidar Berg]

Hello Simon,

I have forwarded this to our nrfutil team to understand what is causing this error and currently waiting to hear back from them. In the meantime, if you have our VS code extension installed, you may try installing the SDK and toolchain from there to see if you get the same result. 

install_ncs.html

Best regards,

Vidar

Update: feedback from developer:

Sounds a bit weird to end up with a zero length file there, but get that far in the install process without other errors. The error comes from parsing /home/<user>/ncs/toolchains/<toolchain sha>/environment.json, which they said is empty, but usually shouldn't be if the toolchain tarball was extracted correctly. Would have expected earlier errors if the extraction failed. 

Could you ask them to paste in the exact command line invocation they ran, and the complete output from standard output? Did all previous attempts at installing the SDK fail in the same way, or did the first attempt fail in a different way?

Wondering if maybe a previous toolchain install somehow failed, but was still registered as a valid toolchain. By default, nrfutil sdk-manager doesn't reinstall a toolchain if it's previously installed, but I see that I can mess up my own toolchain pretty badly and still detect it as being already installed and then fail in a similar way when installing the SDK. 

If they do nrfutil sdk-manager install v3.2.1 --force it should override that and reinstall the toolchain from the tarball again.