Installing WPILIB

A guide for personal computers only: For programming laptops given out, go to the laptop hospital

WPILIB is the main library programming uses for building programs for the robot. When the provided programming laptops are slow it can be helpful to download it on a computer of your own. This tutorial follows that process of instillation

Prerequisites

Some prerequisites must be met in order to install WPILIB with ease

Supported systems and architectures

  • Windows 10 & 11, 64 bit only. 32 bit and Arm are not supported
  • Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04, 64 bit. Other Linux distributions with glibc >= 2.34 may work, but are unsupported
  • macOS 13.3 or higher, both Intel and Arm

Download WPILIB Installer

If you have met all the perquisites, congrats, you are now ready to download WPILIB! 👍

Download WPILIB here

Install from github (optional)

Extract Installer

Once you have downloaded the WPILIB installer you ust extract the installer to set up WPILIB officially. It is a disk image file .iso for Windows, .tar.gz for Linux, and a DMG file for macOS

Open installer

Open installer on Windows

Windows 10+ users can right click on the downloaded disk image and select Mount to open it. Then launch WPILibInstaller.exe.

Screenshot of Mount in Window's file manager

You can use 7-zip to extract the disk image by right-clicking, selecting 7-Zip and selecting Extract to…. you may need to select Show more options at the bottom of the context menu.

Screenshot of extracting 7-zip file

Open installer on macOS

macOS users can double click on the downloaded dmg and then select WPILibInstaller to launch the application.

Screenshot of d m g file on the installer

Run Installer

Upon opening the installer, press start in the bottom left corner

Screenshot of installer upon opening Screenshot of installer asking for installation options

There are 2 options upon starting instillation, select install for this user and one of the following options:

  • Tools Only installs just the WPILib tools (Pathweaver, Shuffleboard, RobotBuilder, SysId, Glass, and OutlineViewer) and JDK.
  • Everything installs the full development environment (VS Code, extensions, all dependencies), WPILib tools, and JDK. (Recommended)

Screenshot of VSCode options The above showcases options fro the downloading of VScode select one:

  • Download for this computer only
    • This downloads VS Code only for the current platform. (smallest)
  • Skip and don’t use VS Code
    • Skips installing VS Code. Useful for advanced installations or configurations. (Not recommended)
  • Select existing VS Code archive for offline install on this computer
    • Selecting this option will bring up a prompt allowing you to select a pre-existing zip file of VS Code that has been downloaded by the installer previously. This option does not let you select an already installed copy of VS Code on your machine.
  • Create VS Code archives to share with other computers/OSes for offline install
    • This option downloads and saves a copy of VS Code for all platforms, which is useful for sharing the copy of the installer.

Select Download for this computer only, WPILIB will begin downloading (size ~150MB). Once finished select next.

Downloading

Once complete, you should be presented with an image that’s similar to the one below

Completed instillation screen

Congrats! you have successfully installed WPILIB. Press Finish to complete instillation

Post Instillation and Information

Post instillation fro macOS

Drag the VS Code application to the dock. Eject WPILibInstaller image from the desktop. Do not move it elsewhere as this may cause the application to not work

What is installed

  • Visual Studio Code - WPILIB version
  • C++ compiler
  • Gradle
  • Java JDK/JRE
  • WPILIB tools - SmartDashboard, Shuffleboard, RobotBuilder, OutlineViewer, PathWeaver, Glass, SysId, Data Log Tool, roboRIO Team Number Setter, AdvantageScope, Elastic, WPIcal
  • WPILIB dependencies
  • VS code extensions
  • Documentation