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Troubleshooting West

This page covers common issues with west and how to solve them.

“invalid choice: ‘post-init’”

If you see this error when running west init:

west: error: argument <command>: invalid choice: 'post-init'
(choose from 'init', 'update', 'list', 'manifest', 'diff',
'status', 'forall', 'config', 'selfupdate', 'help')

Then you have an old version of west installed, and are trying to use it in a workspace that requires a more recent version.

The easiest way to resolve this issue is to upgrade west and retry as follows:

  1. Install the latest west with the -U option for pip3 install as shown in Installing west.

  2. Back up any contents of zephyrproject/.west/config that you want to save. (If you don’t have any configuration options set, it’s safe to skip this step.)

  3. Completely remove the zephyrproject/.west directory (if you don’t, you will get the “already in a workspace” error message discussed next).

  4. Run west init again.

“already in an installation”

You may see this error when running west init with west 0.6:

FATAL ERROR: already in an installation (<some directory>), aborting

If this is unexpected and you’re really trying to create a new west workspace, then it’s likely that west is using the ZEPHYR_BASE environment variable to locate a workspace elsewhere on your system.

This is intentional; it allows you to put your Zephyr applications in any directory and still use west to build, flash, and debug them, for example.

To resolve this issue, unset ZEPHYR_BASE and try again.