custom "Arduino15" path

[harryberlin]

Feature Request

Current behavior

the Arduino15 path is placed in "%USERPATH%\AppData\Local" and is used by CLI and IDE

Expected behavior

add option portable folder to place the Arduino15 files there, like IDE portable function
or add option to place Arduino15 in the same path, where arduino-cli.exe exist

Environment

• CLI version (output of arduino-cli version): 0.10.0 Commit: ec5c3ed
• OS and platform: Windows 10 64bit

Additional context

so it's possilbe to use the CLI standalone

[matthijskooijman]

I believe that arduino-cli indeed usally loads its config file from the Arduino15 path, but inside that file you can specify a different path for storing e.g. the downloaded cores. Did you see https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/configuration/ ? Maybe that would solve your need?

Furthermore, you can even change the location of the configfile using the --config-file option (might not be terribly convenient).

Lastly, arduino-cli will try to read a config file from the current directory, or its parents, which might also be helpful (though that feature is somewhat controversial and might be removed or modified in the future, see #758).

[harryberlin]

Do you have an command line example to use the custom data path for compile?

in my case: arduino-cli.exe compile -b arduino:avr:nano -o Release\AVR_IBus_NANO C:\Sketchpath

[matthijskooijman]

You would have to specify a custom data path in the arduino-cli.yaml file, e.g. something like:

directories:
  data: /home/user/arduino-cli-data
  downloads: /home/user/arduino-cli-data/staging
  user: /home/user/arduino-cli-sketchbook

The put this file in your Arduino15 directory, or elsewhere and pass its filename to --config-file.

Does that help?

[harryberlin]

i have a complete copy of the Arduino15 path, where the arduino-cli.exe exist.

yaml file ist this and placed in arduino-cli.exe:

directories:
  data: /Arduino15

commandline ist this:
arduino-cli.exe --config-file pathtoconfigfile\arduino-cli.yaml compile -b arduino:avr:nano -o Release\AVR_IBus_NANO C:\Sketchpath

but it's not working.

Error creating instance: There were errors loading platform indexes

[matthijskooijman]

I'm not sure how this works exactly on Windows, but on Linux starting a path with a / makes it absolute:

data: /Arduino15

Maybe that should contain a full path to the Arduino15 directory, or maybe just remove the leading / would be sufficient to make it relative to the current directory (which could still be fragile, unless arduino-cli would interpret it relative to the config file itself, not sure if it does).

[harryberlin]

same result without /
that's why, the best solution would be a "portable" option

[per1234]

Closing because Arduino CLI already provides the capability to specify a custom directories.data as Matthijs explained.