(Tutorial in the making!...)
The Espressif Internet Development Framework (ESP-IDF) is core development tool-chain for the ESP32 chip. It includes the compiler, programming tools and various software components that enable software development on the chip. In this tutorial we will look at setting it up and describing in brief, the structure of the framework.

Windows ESP-IDF Setup

The setup on other operating systems should be easier than Windows. I did set it up on Ubuntu and it was easier, so lets get started.

Step 1: Download the pre-compiled MYSYS2 environment for ESP32

There are other ways to accomplish this like compiling the environment itself but I would rather recommend doing this. So download it from the link below.

https://dl.espressif.com/dl/esp32_win32_msys2_environment_and_toolchain-20160816.zip

Step 2: Extract the tool-chain to the C: drive

This will create a folder called msys32 as shown. Msys32.JPG

Step 3: Download the ESP-IDF

You may either download it by cloning it with git like so

git clone --recursive https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf.git

or you download the repository directory.

Note: When downloading the git ensure that recursive is there, so that it can download all the required dependencies.

I did it under a directory called esp_bm (bm-baremetal) so that I can keep everything organized like so Esp-idf-dwnld.JPG Notice that I have downloaded and extracted it to a different drive(F:) than the tool-chain(C:). So the next obvious thing is to tell the toolchain where the ESP-IDF is. We will do this in Step 5.

Step 4: Download a project template

The project template has all the essentials setup. Download and extract it from the like so:

git clone https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf-template.git blink

This will download the example template in the blink directory. You may also manually download it manually from the repo. Clone template.JPG

Step 5: Configure the project

As said in Step 3, we need to first set the esp-idf path in the tool chain and resolve if there are any dependencies. To do this open an MSYS2 terminal window by running C:\msys32\msys2_shell.cmd like so.. Open msys2.JPG

  • Type the following command to set up the ESP-IDF path. You may change the path according to where you've downloaded the ESP-IDF in step 3.
export IDF_PATH="F:/esp32_bm/esp-idf"

Export idf path.JPG

  • Now let's try and open the project directory, which we have named blink from the msys2 terminal like so

Cd blink.JPG

  • ESP-IDF has a cool menu system to configure the project. This can be accessed by the command below:
make menuconfig

If everything goes well, you'll see this window: Config menu.JPG

  • Then hit the make command to compile the project.
make

Compile blink esp32.JPG

Step 5: (Optional) Configure msys2 with ESP-IDF path for future use

In the previous step, we configured the ESP-IDF path first. Now if we close and open the msys2 terminal it will forget the path. If you don't intend to move around the ESP-IDF directory we can configure msys2 to remember it. To do this, edit the profile.d file under C:/msys32/etc/profile.d and the following line to it.

export IDF_PATH="F:/esp32_bm/esp-idf"