Setting up Development Environment

Setup

Install devkitA64. If it's already installed, update it. On Windows, there's a graphical installer. On Unix-like platforms such as Linux/macOS, there's a Perl script. Make sure you also select libnx and the switch examples when installing.

Windows

devkitPro provides 64bit precompiled windows binaries of devkitA64 which can be run directly on Windows.

• download the latest version of the graphical installer from github and run it, following the instructions as you go.
• An Internet connection is required.
• You will want to make sure devkitA64 is selected during the installation process to develop for the Switch - you can also install devkitARM (for 3DS, DS and GBA) and devkitPPC (for GameCube/Wii development) if you wish.
• Once the installer has finished, launch MSYS from:
  • Windows 7 and earlier: Start -> All Programs -> devkitPro -> MSYS
  • Windows 8 and 8.1: Right click on the Start screen and select 'All Apps'. You should find MSYS there.
  • Windows 10 (pre-Anniversary Update): Start -> All Apps -> devkitPro -> MSYS
  • Windows 10 (post-Anniversary Update): Start -> devkitPro -> MSYS

Unix-like platforms

Currently devkitPro provides precompiled versions of devkitARM for the following Unix-like platforms: Linux (x86_64), macOS (x86_64). Note that Linux x86_64 binaries are usable under WSL.

• First, you need to install curl so the installer can download the devkitARM packages, and you should also install Git - you'll need it to update libnx or share your code on GitHub, among many other things. If you are running Linux, you'll also need wget; it comes preinstalled on most distributions, but not all.

• Find your way into a shell (eg. by opening a Terminal window), and follow the instructions for your OS:
  • Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Ubuntu on WSL: sudo apt-get install git curl
  • Fedora/CentOS/RHEL: sudo yum install git curl
  • openSUSE: sudo zypper install git curl
  • Arch Linux/ALWSL: sudo pacman -S git curl wget
  • macOS: Download Git from [1] and install it. Curl is included with the OS.

• Next, we need to download, make executable and run the devkitARM updater (don't worry, the updater is also the installer.)

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devkitPro/installer/master/perl/devkitA64update.pl -o devkitA64update.pl
chmod +x ./devkitA64update.pl
./devkitA64update.pl

You can either use sudo here or chown /opt/devkitpro to be writable by your user before running the script.

Building the examples

Switch examples are still being created; however, there are a growing number of examples available from the switchbrew/switch-examples GitHub repository. These are downloaded by the installer and can be found in $DEVKITPRO/examples/switch

These can be built from the command line.

To start a new homebrew project from the bash shell, simply type the following (replacing ~/projects/myswitchproject with the place you would like your project to be stored, with ~ meaning your HOME directory):

cp -r $DEVKITPRO/examples/switch/templates/application ~/projects/myswitchproject
cd ~/projects/myswitchproject

The standard Makefile will use the folder as the name of the .nro that will be built. You can keep that behaviour or simply change the TARGET := $(notdir $(CURDIR)) line in the Makefile to explicitly name your project.

To compile it, type make in the project directory.