Question about KiCad Mac incremental build

[Anthony Park]

I'm new to C++ projects and spending a lot of time on builds. I have a question about incremental builds on Mac.

When I modify a single file in pcbnew and want to apply only that change, what command should I run?

Currently I'm facing these issues:

• Running build.py from kicad-mac-builder doesn't seem to apply my changes
• Running make kicad in the build folder starts a full rebuild from scratch, taking over an hour

I'm trying to work around this by:

1. Running make pcbnew and make install directly in build/src/kicad-build/
2. Re-bundling pcbnew.app
3. Re-integrating it into the main kicad.app bundle

Is this the right workflow for incremental development, or is there a better approach for faster iteration when making small changes to pcbnew?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, as the long build times are really slowing down my development process.

Thanks in advance!

[Jon Evans]

Hi Anthony,

In general, build.py is only used for initial setup of the required dependencies, and in CI to automatically build the whole installation image. Developers usually don't need to build the whole image to just test a part of KiCad.

When you touch a file, running make for the target in question should just rebuild that target, not a full rebuild. It sounds like something is off with your make command if that is triggering a full rebuild, but I haven't seen that before.

There is no need to re-make the kicad.app bundle just for testing changes to pcbnew. You can run the PCB editor standalone by setting the right environment variables (e.g. KICAD_RUN_FROM_BUILD_DIR).

I also recommend using Ninja instead of make as described at https://dev-docs.kicad.org/en/build/macos/index.html but this should not be related to your described problem.

-Jon

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[Anthony Park]

Thank you for your reply, John.

So for debugging the PCB editor, would it be okay to understand that I can just run make pcbnew in the build folder, set up the environment variables, and then debug it as a standalone application?

2025년 6월 9일 월요일 오후 9시 59분 29초 UTC+9에 j...@craftyjon.com님이 작성:

[Jon Evans]

Yes, that is correct. Note that you do need to do a full build at least once, but after that you only need to build what has changed. 

[Anthony Park]

Now I understand. Thank you for the quick reply!

2025년 6월 9일 월요일 오후 10시 16분 52초 UTC+9에 j...@craftyjon.com님이 작성: