What Is Toaster and How to Use It to Build Your Custom Linux Image With Yocto Project

Introduction

Toaster is a web interface that can be used to configure and run the Yocto Project build activities. In other words, it makes things simpler for those of you which are new and not yet used to command line type of interaction with the machine.

Under the hood, Toaster communicates with the two parts of Yocto Project, namely BitBake and Poky build system to manage and get information about builds, packages and images.

There are two ways of using Toaster for building custom Linux images with Yocto Project, either locally on your machine, or hosted.

Why use Toaster locally?

You can run Toaster as a local instance on your machine, after installing it on top of Poky. Poky is the technical jargon of Yocto Project for its reference distribution system, so to say, the manner in which Yocto Project itself is distributed.

The local manner of using Toaster is suitable for single user development and it provides you with the simplicity of a graphic interface to control the build process (as Yocto Project says:BitBake). Toaster provides you access to some build information as well.