Building and Editing a Design

Building a design and opening the board or schematic editor both talk to the JITX runtime — the same backend the VSCode extension uses. The difference: in VSCode the extension starts the runtime for you, while from the CLI you start it yourself, once per working session.

Start the runtime

You installed the runtime during project setup. Each working session, start it in the background and confirm it’s reachable:

jitx runtime start --background
jitx runtime status     # "Runtime: reachable at ws://localhost:..." once started

Stop it when you’re done:

jitx runtime stop

Build a design

Build a single design by its fully-qualified name (from jitx find), or build every design in the project at once:

jitx build myboard.main.myboard   # one design
jitx build-all                    # every design in the project

A successful build reports each design’s status:

Running design myboard.main.myboard...
myboard.main.myboard:
  design: myboard.main.myboard
  status: ok

If no runtime is running, the build stops with a reminder to start one:

Error: no runtime reachable in this project. Start one with `jitx runtime start --background`, or run with `--dry` to skip the build step.

Note

If your project environment is managed by uv, the build’s dependency check may warn that pip isn’t available. Run uv pip install pip once, or pass --no-dependency-check to skip the check.

Open the board and schematic editors

jitx ui open launches JITX’s interactive editors in a standalone window — the same board (PCB layout) and schematic editors as the VSCode panels. These UIs allow you to place and route on the board and edit the schematic by hand.

jitx ui open --board       # board (PCB layout) editor
jitx ui open --schematic   # schematic editor

The editor connects to the running runtime. If the project contains a single design it’s selected automatically; otherwise pass --design myboard.main.myboard to choose one. You can also pick a design from the drop-down menu in both UIs.