PyOpenocdClient

PyOpenocdClient is a Python library for controlling OpenOCD software tool.

It allows to send Tcl commands from Python programs to OpenOCD — for instance commands like halt execution of the program, view data in memory, place breakpoints, single-step, ...

In addition, a console utility is included with PyOpenocdClient that can be used to send Tcl commands to OpenOCD from non-Python software, such as shell scripts.

Main features of PyOpenocdClient:

• you can send any Tcl command to OpenOCD and obtain its result;

• shorcuts for quick use of most common OpenOCD commands are provided;

• command failures are detected (and reported as Python exceptions by default);

• the code is fully covered via unit tests;

• integration testing regularly runs against multiple versions of OpenOCD;

• the code is multiplatform and portable — it does not have any dependencies except for the Python's standard library;

• the library is fully open-source under a permissive license (MIT license).

Quick instructions

Install PyOpenocdClient package using Pip:

$ python3 -m pip install PyOpenocdClient

Basic usage from Python:

from py_openocd_client import PyOpenocdClient

with PyOpenocdClient(host="localhost", port=6666) as ocd:

    ocd.reset_halt()
    ocd.cmd("load_image path/to/program.elf")
    ocd.resume()
    # ...

Basic usage from a command-line or shell scripts:

$ openocd_cmd --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 version
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.12.0+dev-02634-g390b9d731 (2026-08-29-14:15)

$ openocd_cmd --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 "reset halt ; reg pc"
pc (/32): 0x08001234

Documentation

For full documentation, please visit: https://pyopenocdclient.readthedocs.io/en/latest/