prebuilt for ARM devices... [$65]

[bmatusiak]

there are 2 common arm build as i can see

one is armel and the other is armhf

it would be cool if there was a ARM prebuilt binary

If there are others who would like to see ARM prebuilt binaries add a +1 to this issue and hopefully maintainer will deliver

There is a $65 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.

[katanacrimson]

Related: #193, #437.

[davidbenhaim]

+1

[timonsku]

+1
Would be great for digital signage.

[dtauschke]

+1

[pvoisin]

+1

[cranic]

+1

[richardanaya]

+1

[richardanaya]

Does anyone know the current steps to doing this?

[gumyn]

Yeah something to "dd" on the ssd card ;) and paf node-webkit on rpi

Awesome ^^

[milanvanschaik]

Would be really nice! Want to run it on a Raspberry Pi (in fullscreen :-)).

[cranic]

@milanvanschaik but you can do this with chromium-browser in kiosk mode :-)

[bmatusiak]

@cranic, "chromium-browser" does not support nodejs plugins/modules automatically

[silkycove]

+1

[jtenner]

Workaround so far is chromium-browser with browserified packages (browser specific shims.) This is undesirable of course. Anyone who needs a solution now might benefit from this though.

[milanvanschaik]

What about this? Seems like possible but we simply need a 'prebuild' version?
#193 (comment)

[silkycove]

I was misunderstanding. I simply thought that I can do npm node-webkit on Raspberry Pi when the binary is available. During trying to build node-webkit with latest deps packages, I learnt that it was not easy to maintain multiple arm binaries. I will withdraw my +1 now. -1 ;-)
Note: Actualy, I could not build webkit on Raspberry pi (w/DISTCC) with latest deps. The build is terminated by VFP related error on merging V8. I do not know it is the cause but I found "Removed ARM support for VFP2." on V8 3.18.0 release note.

[xingped]

+1. None of the instructional gists for compiling my own version seem to work. I'm dying for a prebuilt binary for arm.

[ndhunju]

+1

[qrpike]

+1

[jaredallard]

+2

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 1:48 PM, Quinton Pike notifications@github.com
wrote:

+1

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1151 (comment)
.

[smolleyes]

+1

[raykamp]

+1

[bmatusiak]

We are at 14 votes, so please vote!

[Dbuggerx]

+1

[nicu]

+1

[paul-piro]

+1

[alexjstubbs]

+1

[gumyn]

+5

[chrisJohn404]

+1

[Gutem]

Electron has ARM support: electron/electron#2094
https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/3k5xrq/electron_on_raspberry_pi/

[doej1367]

there are 2 common arm build as i can see

one is armel and the other is armhf

it would be cool if there was a ARM prebuilt binary

If there are others who would like to see ARM prebuilt binaries add a +1 to this issue and hopefully maintainer will deliver

There is a $65 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.

I hope this includes ARMv6 or in other words the Raspberry Pi Zero.

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[hthetiot]

I'm looking into providing 0.39.2 on arm and pursuing work started here.
I will reply here if I succeed.

• https://github.com/LeonardLaszlo/nw.js-armv7-binaries/

[llamasoft]

Good news! There's no technical reason why NW.js can't be built for ARM devices. In fact, Chromium has supported ARM builds for a while now. Heck, Chromium OS runs on ARM devices.

Building NW.js only required one tweak and one extra install step, but the build was successful and I ended up with ARM binaries. To make things easier, I took notes during the process and put together the following script for building the ARM binaries from an Ubuntu machine: https://gist.github.com/llamasoft/33af03b73945a84d7624460d67b922ab

The two modifications required were:

1. Running build/linux/sysroot_scripts/install-sysroot.py --arch=arm to install the ARM sysroot files.
2. Modifying third_party/node-nw/common.gypi to point to the ARM sysroot files. (PR Update common.gypi to allow for ARM builds node#38)

Aside from that, you just have to set the correct build flags and wait a few hours for the build to complete.

[llamasoft]

Good news! The full build was successful, including the packaging:

root@nwjs-builder:~/nwjs/src# ls -alh out/nw/dist/
total 205M
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K Feb 18 00:28 .
drwx------ 22 root root 4.0K Feb 18 00:27 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   90 Feb 18 00:28 SHASUMS256.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  20M Feb 18 00:28 nw-headers-v0.44.2.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  77M Feb 18 00:28 nwjs-sdk-symbol-v0.44.2-linux-arm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 109M Feb 18 00:27 nwjs-sdk-v0.44.2-linux-arm.tar.gz

I've updated my build script gist to reflect the steps and arguments required to create the ARM/Linux build. The script currently requires two manual changes (PR 38 and PR 7382) and includes a hacky workaround for one upstream issue.

I still need to test the resulting files on my Raspberry Pi, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Once NW.js offers pre-built packages for ARM devices, it will unblock a major nw-builder issue which should bring a whole plethora of NW.js apps to ARM devices!

[LeonardLaszlo]

@llamasoft Thanks for your effort!

[exander77]

This is great, I can drop running applications in Chrome and rewrite it to nwjs!

[jalbam]

Is that for ARMv7 only or also for ARMv6?

[llamasoft]

@jalbam These changes primarily target ARMv7 (because that's what Chromium and LLVM considers the "arm" target architecture). That said, you should be able to modify the build files to set -march flags to compile to ARMv6.

[jonwwilkes]

@llamasoft Can confirm, your build script works!

It would be great if you could get Roger to update the build instructions so that something like your script is linked. I'd guess that most devs would rather run a single script and get a coffee than manually read about and type out every build instruction.

Also-- do you know if there's any point to trying an aarch64 build? The arm build seems to run fine on my aarch64 laptop-- not sure if there are any obvious benefits to compiling for the aarch64 instruction set.

[bmatusiak]

@llamasoft the script fails on Pi-4b - buster image

[llamasoft]

@bmatusiak I imagine it would fail. The system requirements for building Chrome is something like 100GB of storage and at least 8GB of RAM. The script builds binaries for ARM but the build itself doesn't need to take place on an ARM device. You're better off building the files on a more powerful machine and copying the results over.

[bmatusiak]

i year ya.. i have it setup on POE with NFS,, only limit i have is ram ;)

[LeonardLaszlo]

Probably 8GB of ram are not enough for the linking process. I use 16 and I cross-compile. Soon I'll release all flavours of v0.44.x

[fredericbirke]

@LeonardLaszlo I checked your uploaded v0.44.x arm builds and they are working flawlessly so far on a Raspberry Pi 4B with Debian Buster. Thank you for your work!

[LeonardLaszlo]

I am glad I could help.

[toxygen]

@bmatusiak I imagine it would fail. The system requirements for building Chrome is something like 100GB of storage and at least 8GB of RAM. The script builds binaries for ARM but the build itself doesn't need to take place on an ARM device. You're better off building the files on a more powerful machine and copying the results over.

You can always add swap if you are running out of memory. If the storage is slow (e.g. sdcard) you can add swap on NFS mounted storage. I did that when I was compiling node-webkit on Odroid X2. I had to recompile the kernel so I could enable swap on nfs, but it was not a problem.