Kicad is evolving very rapidly, which is a very good thing! However, it is quite frustrating that when opening a project we worked on some time ago, with an older version of Kicad, we end up with broken schematics or worse.

We want to be able to use always the latest version of Kicad when starting a new project, and then be able to freeze it for that project. So, if we stop working on it for some time and then go back, always have the same Kicad version (and libraries) that we used to create the design.

To achieve this we use Docker to create and isolated environment where we can install a particular version of Kicad and use always the same one.

You need to have docker installed on your computer. You can use this summarized instructions.

This script uses the GitHub API to look for the newest version of Kicad and it's libraries. To do that we need to authenticate with the API. For this we need:

1. A github account.
2. To get an application token, as explained here: https://github.com/settings/tokens
3. Clone this repo, cd to the directory and,
4. Run the following command:

./save_github_token <token>

To simplify as much as possible the creation of a new project there is an automated script that creates an new project directory with the ready to use Dockerfile.

To use it:

$ ./new_kicad_project <path to where we want the project>

The script assumes that the project name is the name of the directory where you want the project to be in. There cannot be spaces on the name of the project, nor in the path to it.

For example, if we want to create a project named 'Tiburoncin' in our home directory, we would run:

$ ./new_kicad_project ~/Tiburoncin

That will create the Tiburoncin directory and inside it the docker files needed to build the image with the latest Kicad. It will also:

1. Add some useful files
2. Build the Docker image
3. Create a git repository in that directory

Once we created the project, we cd into the new directory and we will find the following files:

docker/
pcb/
setup.bash
README.md

Following on our example, to start working on the PCB we:

1. $ source setup.bash
2. $ tiburoncin_kicad

Inside the kicad instance you will find that the paths are not the same. The program will be running from the home directory of a kicad user. In that home directory, you will find a folder with the same name as the project you created. That is the same project folder that you just created.

When starting to work on an existing project (a project we just cloned from github for example), we need to follow these steps only once:

1. $ source setup.bash
2. $ cd docker
3. $ <project_name>_docker_build (wait a lot of time...)

Afther that, we start kicad (after source the setup.bash)

1. $ dockerr_kicad

You can read about how this works on this document