Hey all,
If you’ve ever found that your incremental Zephyr builds feel slower than they should, you’re probably running into the same thing I was: every -D flag you pass to west build triggers a pristine rebuild under the hood, even when nothing has changed.
I just put up a new blog post that walks through:
- The flag-by-flag breakdown of a real
west build command (with EXTRA_CONF_FILE, sysbuild defines, the works)
- The one-line trick for making incremental builds actually incremental
- How to set up
env/ overlays for per-board config and secrets
- Smart Builds, Build All Boards, and
.zephyr-overrides.json in the latest Zephyr Tools
- Per-target West manifest selection (vanilla Zephyr on one board, NCS on another, same project)
- A troubleshooting checklist for “my builds still feel slow”
👉 Read it here: Zephyr 101: West, Overlays, and Faster Builds in Zephyr Tools
It’s also the companion writeup to the Updates! livestream if you’d rather watch.
A couple of things I’d genuinely love feedback on:
- Are you using
EXTRA_CONF_FILE for secrets/PSKs, or do you have a different pattern that works better for you?
.zephyr-overrides.json — commit it or gitignore it? I lean toward committing it for shared settings, but I can see arguments either way.- Anything you’d want to see in the next Zephyr Tools release? This is the time to file ideas.
Thanks for reading 🛠️
— Jared
