LibrePCB is a free EDA suite to develop printed circuit boards on Windows, Linux and MacOS. More information and screenshots are available at librepcb.org.
Official stable releases are provided at our download page.
Please read our user manual to see how you can install and use LibrePCB. The quickstart tutorial provides a step-by-step guide through the whole process of designing a PCB.
Contributions are welcome! See
librepcb.org/contribute and
CONTRIBUTING.md
for details.
For internal details take a look at the developers documentation.
WARNING: The master
branch always contains the latest UNSTABLE version of
LibrePCB. Everything you do with this unstable version could break your
workspace, libraries or projects, so you should not use it productively! For
productive use, please install an official release as described in the
user manual. For development, please read details
here.
To compile and run LibrePCB, you need the following software components:
- Compiler: g++, MinGW or Clang (any version with C++17 support should work)
- Qt >= 6.2 or 5.12...5.15 (make sure the imageformats plugin is installed too as it will be needed at runtime!).
- OpenCASCADE OCCT or OCE (optional, OCCT highly preferred)
- OpenGL Utility Library GLU (optional)
- zlib
- OpenSSL
- CMake 3.16 or newer
Instead of installing the dependencies manually on your system (see instructions below), you can also use one of our Docker images with all dependencies pre-installed (except GUI tools like QtCreator). These images are actually used for CI, but are also useful to build LibrePCB locally.
sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake openssl zlib1g zlib1g-dev \
qt6-base-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools qt6-l10n-tools \
libqt6core5compat6-dev qt6-declarative-dev libqt6opengl6-dev libqt6svg6-dev \
qt6-image-formats-plugins libglu1-mesa-dev libtbb-dev libxi-dev \
occt-misc libocct-*-dev
sudo apt-get install qtcreator # optional
sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake openssl zlib1g zlib1g-dev \
qt5-default qtdeclarative5-dev qttools5-dev-tools qttools5-dev \
qtquickcontrols2-5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5svg5-dev \
qt5-image-formats-plugins libglu1-mesa-dev liboce-*-dev
sudo apt-get install qt5-doc qtcreator # optional
sudo pacman -S base-devel git cmake openssl zlib desktop-file-utils shared-mime-info \
qt6-base qt6-5compat qt6-declarative qt6-svg qt6-tools qt6-imageformats opencascade
sudo pacman -S qt6-doc qtcreator # optional
Note: Instead of installing the dependencies and building LibrePCB manually,
you could install the package
librepcb-git from the AUR.
The package clones and builds the latest version of the master
branch from
GitHub.
- Install Xcode through the app store and start it at least once (for the license)
- Install homebrew (the package manager)
- Install dependencies:
brew update && brew install qt6 cmake opencascade
- Make the toolchain available:
brew unlink qt && brew link --force qt6
Download and run the Qt for Windows installer from here. LibrePCB does not compile with MSVC, so you must install following components with the Qt installer:
- MinGW 11.2.0 64-bit compiler
- Qt binaries for MinGW 11.2.0 64-bit (use the latest 6.x version)
- Qt 5 Compatibility Module for MinGW 11.2.0 64-bit
- Qt Image Formats for MinGW 11.2.0 64-bit
- CMake
For the OpenCascade library the installation procedure is not that easy
unfortunately. Basically you have to build it by yourself, see instructions
here.
However, to avoid this effort you could instead just set the CMake option
USE_OPENCASCADE=0
(can be set in the QtCreator build config) to allow
compiling LibrePCB without OpenCascade.
It's important to clone the repository recursively to get all submodules too:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/LibrePCB/LibrePCB.git && cd LibrePCB
When updating the repository, make sure to also update all the submodules recursively. Otherwise you may get strange compilation errors:
git submodule update --init --recursive
You can either build LibrePCB using Qt Creator, or you can build on the command line using cmake. To build LibrePCB using cmake/make:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j8
The binary can then be found in build/apps/librepcb/
.
For more detailed instructions (including how to set up Qt Creator), see https://developers.librepcb.org/d5/d96/doc_building.html
- First of all, many thanks to all of our contributors!
- A big thank you goes to all our sponsors which help to keep this project alive!
- Special thanks also to cloudscale.ch for sponsoring our API server!
LibrePCB is published under the GNU GPLv3 license.