I've looked at every gds file that exists after make user_project_wrapper. Not a single one contains both the management, ram blocks, AND my user project. It's either just my project, or just the caravel layout with an empty user block!!!

gds/user_project_wrapper.gds should have your own project in a larger area with nothing but wires outside your project. Doing a

make ship

in the root of the project (not inside the openlane directory) will use magic to combine the blocks into a caravel.gds (or caravel_out.gds) including whatever is in user_project_wrapper.gds

Ah! Let me try.

check that

user_project_wrapper

has your project in it and is not the empty block that came with Caravel. Otherwise you will just be regenerating what was already there

results in empty caravel.gds and this error

Reading "user_project_wrapper".
File ../mag/caravel.mag couldn't be read
No such file or directory
Creating new cell
   Writing cell caravel
Using technology "sky130A", version 1.0.81-0-gb184e85

Check if you don't have a caravel.mag.gz instead of caravel.mag

Finally got it done. Thanks for the help.

Congratulations!

But now the caravel.gds.gz is too large for Github!

That is a complicated problem. I made the mistake of just deleting it and it messed up git in a way that took the whole day to fix

is there any workaround to the "too large for github" issue yet?

@Anish You could try xz compression (example attached).