Workbench FAQ

Reporting bugs and feedback

Follow the instructions in this community forum post to report bugs or provide feedback.
The Developer Tools - Workbench Category in the community forums should be used for Workbench support.

Working with a custom Device OS build

It's possible to work with a non-released branch, fork, or manually merged PRs of Device OS.

Get the latest Device OS source from GitHub. You'll need to have the command line version of git available in order to retrieve the submodules.

git clone https://github.com/particle-iot/device-os
cd ./device-os
git checkout develop
git submodule update --init --recursive

Launch Visual Studio Code
Navigate to your Particle settings (docs) and set the Custom Device OS Location

Particle Global Settings

Enter the absolute path to your Device OS source code and reload when prompted
Open a Particle project and open a source file
Click on the Device OS entry in the status bar to display a list of available toolchains

Particle Project Settings

Select the deviceOS@source entry - it should be first in the list
Wait for the toolchain to install and activate
Run commands (docs) and local compilation tasks as normal (docs)

Error: Unable to load manifest

Unable to load manifest for: ~/path/to/device-os - attempted to load: ~/path/to/device-os/.workbench/manifest.json

Workbench attempts to load a manifest located within the Device OS source repository. If that file isn't available or if you've somehow incorrectly set the Custom Device OS Location setting, you'll see this error.

Uninstalling Workbench

Open VSCode.
Click the Extensions button on the left toolbar (Activity bar).
Click on the gear icon for the Workbench extension and select Uninstall.
Repeat for the C/C++ and Cortex-Debug extensions
Close and re-open VSCode, then close it again.
Delete the ~/.particle/toolchains directory.

Uninstalling VSCode

Mac

Find your Visual Studio Code.app file (typically in ~/Applications or /Applications)
Delete Visual Studio Code.app

Windows

Open Add/Remove Programs.
Select Microsoft Visual Studio Code and click the Uninstall button

Linux

Open a terminal
Run sudo apt-get purge code. This currently only works with Ubuntu and other Debian-style distributions.

Linux Tips

On 64-bit Linux you may need to install 32-bit libraries:

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libarchive-zip-perl libncurses-dev

If you get a permission error when debugging, you may need to add udev rules.
- If you have the Particle Workbench, run the Particle: Launch CLI command and then run particle usb configure in the terminal that launches
- if you just have the Particle CLI, open a terminal and run particle usb configure
- Otherwise, you can download 50-particle.rules and copy it to /etc/udev/rules.d/

Enabling pre-release versions

Certain Device OS releases are preview releases, intended for early testing of an upcoming release, to add new features, or fix specific issues.

Click the settings (gear) icon in the lower left, Settings, Extensions, Particle, then enable pre-release Device OS builds.

Enable preview releases

Once you complete this step, Particle: Configure Workspace for Device will include additional versions.