Installation

KiCad v6 and later users

Install the plugin from KiCad's official repository in Plugin and Content Manager.

Easy as 2 clicks.

Eagle/Fusion360/EasyEDA/Allegro Cadence users

Install InteractiveHtmlBom from pypi:

python -m pip install InteractiveHtmlBom

Linux users can add --user flag if touching system libs is undesirable. pip will generate generate_interactive_bom executable in your system (or user) bin path. You can use that instead of python3 .../generate_interactive_bom.py ... invocation.

KiCad nightly users and developers

Note, 7.99 is not v7 and has already significantly diverged from stable release. I try to keep up with the changes but I don't publish them to the plugin manager repository. If you are using 7.99 nightly you will have to install manually as described below. In case of issues report them here, but first make sure that you have latest kicad nightly and latest version of the plugin from git, not a published release.

Where to install

KiCad's Pcbnew plugins can be placed in several places, depending on platform.

The following paths are recommended. You may need to create the scripting\plugins folder if it does not exist:

• Windows

  • %APPDATA%\kicad\scripting\plugins
    (e.g. C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\kicad\scripting\plugins)

• Linux

  • ~/.kicad/scripting/plugins or
  • ~/.kicad_plugins

• MacOS

  • ~/Library/Application Support/kicad/scripting/plugins or on newer versions
  • ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/scripting/plugins

Finding Kicad Plugin Folders

The above list may be out of date or inaccurate for your OS version/distribution. You can get full list of directories that pcbnew is scanning for plugins by running this in scripting console:

import pcbnew
print(pcbnew.PLUGIN_DIRECTORIES_SEARCH)

For Kicad v6 and later there is a special menu item to open the plugin folder directly

Tools → External Plugins → Open Plugin Directory

As well as a corresponding button in Action Plugins pane of the preferences dialog.

Non-Writable Folder Problems

It is recommended to chose a directory that is writable by the user that runs KiCad. Otherwise the option to save plugin settings may not work.

Using C:\Program Files\KiCad\share\kicad\scripting\plugins is not recommended for the same reason, although using the same relative path for portable installation may be a good choice.

How to install

Method 1: Using Symlinks

1. Download latest release or clone plugin repository in a directory of your choice. If you use KiCad nightly version then you have to clone the repository or download the latest development version of the plugin.
2. Create a symlink in one of KiCad's plugin directories to the InteractiveHtmlBom folder.
   • For MacOS and Linux, use the command ln -s <target> <link>
   • For Windows, cmd /c mklink /D <link> <target> does the job.

Method 2: By Copying The Plugin Folder

If you don't want to bother with symlinks, just copy the InteractiveHtmlBom folder or the whole repository into one of plugin directories.

Note For Newer Linux Distributions

Some newer linux distributions (Ubuntu 18.04, Mint 19, Debian 10, maybe others) that don't provide wxPython package built against GTK2 are incompatible with python scripting in KiCad 5.0 and earlier. To use this plugin from Pcbnew you have to update to KiCad 5.1. You can still use this plugin with older versions but only from command line.