developer.md

Freerouting

Freerouting is an advanced autorouter for all PCB programs that support the standard Specctra or Electra DSN interface.

Information for developers

How to build it from source

Requirements

• Java >= 21 (Adoptium Temurin 21 JRE)
• Gradle 6.x
• Internet connection (dependencies are downloaded automatically)
• For IDE integration: Gradle extension (not necessary for command line usage)

IDE

Open the freerouting Gradle project in your favourite IDE (NB, IntelliJ, Eclipse etc. with Gradle Plugin) and build it by calling the assemble task.

Command Line

Navigate to the Gradle project (e.g., path/to/freerouting) and enter the following command

Bash (Linux/OS X/Cygwin/other Unix-like shell)

./gradlew assemble

Windows (CMD)

gradlew assemble

Generated Executables

All four .jar files will be generated in the build\libs subfolder. You would typically run the freerouting-executable.jar file.

How to create a new release

Creating a release takes about half an hour if everything goes according to the plan. Usually it doesn't, so free up ~3 hours for this.

Let's suppose that the new version is 2.3.4. You need to complete these steps:

• Check if there are updated translations on Crowdin and merge them if needed

• Check if there are any outstanding pull requests and merge them as well

• Change ext.publishing.versionId in \gradle\project-info.gradle to 2.3.4

• Push it to GitHub

• Check if it was built successfully on GitHub Actions

• Create a new draft release

• Run gradlew.bat assemble -> this will generate the files in \build\libs\freerouting*.jar

• Rename to freerouting-executable.jar to freerouting-2.3.4.jar and add it to the release draft

• Update the integrations\KiCad

  • Copy freerouting-2.3.4.jar into \integrations\KiCad\kicad-freerouting\plugins\jar\
  • Update \integrations\KiCad\kicad-freerouting\plugins\plugin.ini with the new filename
  • Update \integrations\KiCad\kicad-freerouting\metadata.json
  • Create a ZIP file from the kicad-freerouting folder
  • Copy this kicad-freerouting.zip file to kicad-freerouting-2.3.4.zip
  • Use KiCad Packager from https://gitlab.com/kicad/addons/metadata/tools to get hash and file sizes
  • Update \integrations\KiCad\metadata.json with these values
  • Push these changes to GitHub
  • Run the "Run Kicad repository validation" command in KiCad Packager
  • Delete previous fork at https://gitlab.com/freeroutingapp/metadata (Settings / General / Delete this project)
  • Fork https://gitlab.com/kicad/addons/metadata again
  • Create a new branch, named freerouting-2.3.4
  • Replace https://gitlab.com/freeroutingapp/metadata/-/blob/main/packages/app.freerouting.kicad-plugin/metadata.json with the new one
  • Create a megre request at https://gitlab.com/kicad/addons/metadata / Merge request / ...

• Update README

• Publish the release

• Check if Windows and Linux installers were added to the release in GitHub Actions

• Publish the library to Maven Central

  • Use the Gradle Maven plugin and set the properties in /.gradle/gradle.properties
  • Run the ./gradlew publishToMavenCentral --no-configuration-cache command in the root folder to publish it to Maven Central
  • Release the staging repository

• Change ext.publishing.versionId in \gradle\project-info.gradle again to 2.3.5-SNAPSHOT