Introduction: Easy FPGAs
Apio is a multiplatform toolbox with static pre-built packages to verify, synthesize, simulate and upload your verilog designs into the supported FPGA boards
Apio makes extremely easy the process of working with FPGAs. Go from scratch to having a blinky LED in your FPGA board in minutes! This is because it is based only on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Just install it and use it as you want
In this animation you can see the whole process of testing the Blinky led circuit: Just type one command and the circuit will be synthesized, and uploaded into the FPGA
Think of Apio as a small FPGA distribution, which collects and packages FLOSS toolchains for FPGAs. You can install packages in Linux, Mac and Windows for synthesizing hardware, verifying and simulating from verilog files
The goal is making it very easy to start with FPGAs
As the user gh02t said in this post on Hacker-news:
Apio is a command line tool that automates installing the toolchain for your FPGA and running it. It just simplifies things, you don't have to use it if you'd rather call the individual tools for synthesis, P&R, simulation etc. It'd be reasonable to think of it as akin to a very smart Makefile combined with an automatic package manager, specialized to FPGAs (it's based on PlatformIO). It's nice when you're still kind of getting oriented, because you don't need to know how to set up and invoke the different tools... just call
apio buildorapio simulate
Apio has a command line interface (CLI). It is the building block for other higher level tools, like Icestudio, or working with FPGAs from IDEs such as Visual Studio Code
