LibrePCB is a free EDA software to develop printed circuit boards. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. The project is still in a quite early development stage (no stable release available).

• Cross-platform (Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows)
• Multilingual (both application and library elements)
• All-In-One: project management + library/schematic/board editors
• Intuitive, modern and easy-to-use graphical user interface
• Very powerful library design with some innovative concepts
• Human-readable file formats for both libraries and projects
• Multi-PCB feature (different PCB variants of the same schematic)
• Automatic netlist synchronisation between schematic and board

There are no stable releases available yet, so basically you need to compile LibrePCB by yourself. Nevertheless there are easier ways to get LibrePCB running:

• For Windows there are nightly builds available to download: librepcb-nightly.zip
• For Linux there are nightly AppImages available on Bintray: LibrePCB-Nightly-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
• On Arch Linux you can install the package librepcb-git from the AUR.
• Using a Docker container you can build and run LibrePCB on any Linux without cluttering up your system with all the requirements. Just follow these instructions.

Warning: Because LibrePCB's file format is not yet considered as stable (i.e. breaking changes can occur), you should not yet use LibrePCB productively!

To compile LibrePCB, you need the following software components:

• g++ >= 4.8, MinGW >= 4.8, or Clang >= 3.3 (C++11 support is required)
• Qt >= 5.2
• zlib
• OpenSSL

sudo apt-get install git build-essential qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools libglu1-mesa-dev openssl zlib1g zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install qt5-doc qtcreator # optional

sudo pacman -S git base-devel qt5-base qt5-tools desktop-file-utils shared-mime-info openssl zlib
sudo pacman -S qt5-doc qtcreator # optional

1. Install Xcode through the app store and start it at least once (for the license)
2. Install homebrew (the package manager)
3. Install qt5: brew update && brew install qt5
4. Make the toolchain available: brew unlink qt && brew link --force qt5

Download and run the Qt for Windows (MinGW) installer from here. LibrePCB does not compile with MSVC, so you must install following components with the Qt installer:

• The MinGW compiler itself
• The Qt libraries for MinGW

It's important to clone the repository recursively to get all submodules too:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/LibrePCB/LibrePCB.git && cd LibrePCB

Building with Qt Creator is probably the easiest way. To keep build time as low as possible make sure to set the correct make flags to use all available CPU cores to build. See this stackoverflow answer.

Since Qt Creator is also using qmake and make to build, it's easy to do the same on the command line:

mkdir build && cd build
qmake -r ../librepcb.pro
make -j 8

Select the run configuration librepcb and click on the Run button:

./generated/unix/librepcb                  # Unix/Linux
open ./build/generated/mac/librepcb.app    # Mac OS X
generated\windows\librepcb.exe             # Windows

On a Unix/Linux system, LibrePCB can be installed with sudo make install.

At the first startup, LibrePCB asks for a workspace directory where the library elements and projects will be saved. For developers there is a demo workspace inclusive library and projects in the submodule "dev/demo-workspace/".

Note: As LibrePCB is still under heavy developement, it's highly recommended to use this demo workspace. Otherwise you won't be able to create/use any components and some parts of the application will not work properly.

• First of all, many thanks to all of our contributors!
• Thanks also to cloudscale.ch for sponsoring our API server!

LibrePCB is published under the GNU GPLv3 license.