Installation

Where to install

KiCad's Pcbnew plugins can be placed in several places, depending on platform.

Following paths are recommended:

• Windows

  • %APPDATA%/Roaming/kicad/scripting/plugins

• Linux

  • ~/.kicad/scripting/plugins or
  • ~/.kicad_plugins

• MacOS

  • ~/Library/Application Support/kicad/scripting/plugins or on newer versions
  • ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/scripting/plugins

If a folder does not exist you can create one. Above list may be out of date or inaccurate for your OS version/distribution. You can get full list of directories that pcbnew is scanning for plugins by running this in scripting console:

import pcbnew
print(pcbnew.PLUGIN_DIRECTORIES_SEARCH)

It is recommended to chose a directory that is writable by the user that runs KiCad. Otherwise option to save plugin settings may not work.

Using C:\Program Files\KiCad\share\kicad\scripting\plugins is not recommended for same reason, although using same relative path for portable installation may be a good choice.

How to install

Download latest release or clone plugin repository in a directory of your choice and create a symlink in one of KiCad's plugin directories to InteractiveHtmlBom folder. MacOS and Linux users can do it with ln -s <target> <link>, in windows cmd /c mklink /D <link> <target> does the job. If you don't want to bother with symlinks just copy InteractiveHtmlBom folder or the whole repository into one of plugin directories.

Note: some newer linux distributions (Ubuntu 18.04, Mint 19, Debian 10, maybe others) that don't provide wxPython package built against GTK2 are incompatible with python scripting in KiCad 5.0 and earlier. To use this plugin from pcbnew you have to update to KiCad 5.1. You can still use this plugin with older versions but only from command line.