Installation

Where to install

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

The following paths are recommended. You may need to create the scripting\plugins folder if it does not exist:

• Windows

  • %APPDATA%\kicad\scripting\plugins
    (e.g. C:\Users\[USERNAME]\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

Finding Kicad Plugin Folders

The above list may be out of date or inaccurate for your OS version/distribution.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)

Non-Writable Folder Problems

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

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

How to install

Method 1: Using Symlinks

1. Download latest release or clone plugin repository in a directory of your choice
2. Create a symlink in one of KiCad's plugin directories to the InteractiveHtmlBom folder.
   • For MacOS and Linux, use the command ln -s <target> <link>
   • For Windows, cmd /c mklink /D <link> <target> does the job.

Method 2: By Copying The Plugin Folder

If you don't want to bother with symlinks, just copy the InteractiveHtmlBom folder or the whole repository into one of plugin directories.

Note For Newer Linux Distributions

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.