[Shred]

Is anyone else running the Arduino IDE as a portable application?

As someone who maintains a few older Arduino projects, plus does quite a bit of ESP8266 development using the Arduino IDE, I found myself descending into a hell of conflicting libraries and juggling different versions of the Arduino IDE on different computers.  It was all getting very confusing and difficult to maintain.

I'm now running a separate installation of the Arduino IDE as a portable application - dedicated to the WeatherDuino firmware.  It's great, since none of the libraries change unless they come with a new release of the WD software.  If I want to move it to a different computer, I can just copy the file structure across and I'm up and running.

If anyone is interested in trying this, the basic process is:

• Download the .zip version of the Arduino installer
  
• Unpack to a suitable location
  
• Create a directory named "portable" in the same directory as arduino.exe
  
• On first launch, the following directories will be created:
  

Code:

.\portable\sketchbook
.\portable\sketchbook\libraries

Use the above directories for the WeatherDuino source code.

The official documentation is here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/PortableIDE

[werk_ag]

Never tried it, but sounds like it can be useful for WeatherDuino users, sometimes we use common libraries slightly customized.

[hornychz]

I did not even know about this IDE variation - it looks very interesting and appealing. Thank you for the info.

[uncle_bob]

Nice one Shred! I'll be doing this in the future.

[JT118]

Yes, I do this, on a USB memory stick, so that I can run arduino on college computers I don't have admin rights on. It works well. I run the IDE directly off the USB with no installation on the computer itself at all.

[zitoune]

Very useful - I often switch platform from Mac to Windows depending on what board to program. One way I used was using a shared drive.

[har0ld]

A portable version is now available for download from SourceForge.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/arduino-portable/

You can download from the oldest Arduino IDE version 1.0.5 to the latest version.

[hornychz]

A portable version is now available for download from SourceForge.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/arduino-portable/

You can download from the oldest Arduino IDE version 1.0.5 to the latest version.

Thank you for your post.