espflash

A library and command-line tool for flashing Espressif devices.

Supports the ESP32, ESP32-C2/C3/C6, ESP32-H2, ESP32-S2/S3, and ESP8266.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Permissions on Linux
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux
  • Cargo Runner
• Bootloader and Partition Table
• Configuration File

Installation

If you are installing espflash from source (ie. using cargo install) then you must have rustc>=1.70.0 installed on your system.

If you are running macOS or Linux then libuv must also be installed; this is available via most popular package managers. If you are running Windows you can ignore this step.

# macOS
brew install libuv
# Debian/Ubuntu/etc.
apt-get install libuv-dev
# Fedora
dnf install systemd-devel

To install:

cargo install espflash

Alternatively, you can use cargo-binstall to download pre-compiled artifacts from the releases and use them instead:

cargo binstall espflash

If you would like to flash from a Raspberry Pi using the built-in UART peripheral, you can enable the raspberry feature (note that this is not available if using cargo-binstall):

cargo install espflash --features=raspberry

Usage

A command-line tool for flashing Espressif devices

Usage: espflash <COMMAND>

Commands:
  board-info       Establish a connection with a target device
  completions      Generate completions for the given shell
  flash            Flash an application to a target device
  monitor          Open the serial monitor without flashing
  partition-table  Operations for partitions tables
  save-image       Save the image to disk instead of flashing to device
  write-bin        Writes a binary file to a specific address in the chip's flash
  help             Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Permissions on Linux

In Linux, when using any of the commands that requires using a serial port, the current user may not have access to serial ports and a "Permission Denied" or "Port doesn’t exist" errors may appear.

On most Linux distributions, the solution is to add the user to the dialout group (check e.g. ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0 to find the group) with a command like sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER. You can call su - $USER to enable read and write permissions for the serial port without having to log out and back in again.

Check your Linux distribution’s documentation for more information.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

It is not currently possible to use cargo-espflash from within WSL1. There are no plans to add support for WSL1 at this time.

It is also not possible to flash chips using the built-in USB_SERIAL_JTAG peripheral when using WSL2, because resetting also resets USB_SERIAL_JTAG peripheral, which then disconnects the chip from WSL2. Chips can be flashed via UART using WSL2, however.

Cargo Runner

You can also use espflash as a Cargo runner by adding the following to your project's .cargo/config.toml file, for example:

[target.'cfg(any(target_arch = "riscv32", target_arch = "xtensa"))']
runner = "espflash flash --baud=921600 --monitor /dev/ttyUSB0"

With this configuration you can flash and monitor you application using cargo run.

Configuration File

It's possible to specify a serial port and/or USB VID/PID values by setting them in a configuration file. The location of this file differs based on your operating system:

Configuration examples

You can either configure the serial port name like so:

[connection]
serial = "/dev/ttyUSB0"

Or specify one or more USB vid/pid couple:

[[usb_device]]
vid = "303a"
pid = "1001"

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.