Developer tool guidelines

This section provides guidelines on creating CLI and GUI tools for Fuchsia.

For information on existing tools, please refer to documentation for those tools.

Other topics

Packaging a tool for inclusion in the Integrator Development Kit (IDK)

The Integrator Development Kit (IDK) will contain:

  • The tool binary itself.

  • A document in //docs/development/idk/documentation describing the contract of this tool and how to connect it to the target system. The target audience of this document is people writing integration scripts rather than being an end-user-friendly “how-to” (debugger example).

Environment-specific SDKs

The ffx target list command abstracts device listing and selection across all SDK variants. With the right tool design, the extent of integration required should be to run ffx target list to get the address and pass the address to the tool with other environment-specific flags. In the case of the debugger the tool-specific code would:

  • Connect to a shell (this should be a primitive provided by the environment-specific SDK) on the target and run the debug_agent.

  • Run zxdb with the address provided by ffx target list, passing any local settings files and symbol paths on the command-line.

Tool requirements

Tools should allow all environment parameters to be passed in via command-line arguments. Examples include the location of settings files and symbol locations. This allows different SDKs to be hermetic.

Tools should be written to make writing environment-specific scripts as simple as possible. For example, the debugger should automatically retry connections (https://fxbug.dev/42137364) so the current behavior of waiting for the port to be open in the launch scripts can be removed.

Tool authors are responsible for:

  • Writing the tool with the appropriate interface.
  • Providing documentation on this interface in //docs/development/idk/documentation.
  • Currently please reach out to get bugs filed on individual SDKs. We are working on a better process for this (https://fxbug.dev/42137108).