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Full Version: Running the Arduino IDE as a portable app
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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
Never tried it, but sounds like it can be useful for WeatherDuino users, sometimes we use common libraries slightly customized.
I did not even know about this IDE variation - it looks very interesting and appealing. Thank you for the info.
Smile
Nice one Shred! I'll be doing this in the future.
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.
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.
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.
(02-08-2019, 11:53)har0ld Wrote: [ -> ]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.  Smile