Tutorial: How to Enable Git in KiCad 8

For everyone from google who’s confused how to use this (feature since commit d99641be), it’s currently unfinished and behind an advanced setting flag. See this discourse thread for more info.

Windows 11

  1. Open Run dialog box

Windows key + R

  1. Enter “%AppData%” and click OK

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  1. Open KiCad 8 folder

C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\kicad\8.0

  1. Create new file kicad_advanced (without extension) and put EnableGit=1 in your advanced config file. Save.

  1. Open KiCad 8: the file menu now includes an option “clone project from repository” which is a new option. You can also right click on the a project to get the option for version control.

Screenshot:

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Switch to Branch

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Commit changes

6 Likes

Thank you for this tutorial.
In the clone repository option, my password field is not enabled while it looks enabled on your picture. Any idea why that might be?

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In my machine, it’s enabled by default, but I don’t know why. You must check it by yourself.

There can be quite many gotchas.

KiCad doesn’t have support for many complex or non-standard configurations.

For example, it uses openssh. If you have configured your gitlab or github connection – or whatever service/server you use – to use key authentication with putty (TortoiseGit or GitExtensions), KiCad’s git support doesn’t understand that. You have to have a private/public key file pair available, and the public file should be named like the private file plus “.pub” ending. The simplest way to make this work is to find “ssh-keygen” command line program from your system and use it without any arguments to create a rsa key pair in the default location, then use one of those files to add your key to the server side.

Why is the password field disabled? I don’t know. Is it possible that you have already some global git configuration somewhere, made with some other git tool?

2 Likes

Is it possible to configure this feature on macos as well?

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