Building thin-edge.io

Requirements

You can use any OS to build from source (below has been tested on Ubuntu, but we also use Debian, macOS, and FreeBSD successfully).

Our recommended setup and required tools are:

• Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian 12 (Bookworm)
• git
• Rust toolchain

Following packages are required:

• build-essentials
• curl
• gcc

A list of our test platforms can be found here.

Get the code

thin-edge.io code is in git repository on github to acquire the code use following command:

• via SSH:

git clone git@github.com:thin-edge/thin-edge.io.git

• or via HTTPS:

git clone https://github.com/thin-edge/thin-edge.io.git

Installing toolchain

Rust toolchain

To install Rust follow Official installation guide. To get started you need Cargo's bin directory ($HOME/.cargo/bin) in your PATH environment variable.

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.cargo/bin

And then you can run rustc to view current version:

rustc --version

Output

rustc 1.65.0 (897e37553 2022-11-02)

note

Above command will add rust to path only for existing session, after you restart the session you will have to add it again, to add rust to the path permanently it will depend on your shell but for Bash, you simply need to add the line from above, export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.cargo/bin to your ~/.bashrc.

For other shells, you'll want to find the appropriate place to set a configuration at start time, eg. zsh uses ~/.zshrc. Check your shell's documentation to find what file it uses.

thin-edge.io operates the MSRV (Minimum Supported Rust Version) and uses stable toolchain.

Current MSRV is 1.65.

Cross compilation toolchain (optional)

thin-edge.io can be compiled for target architecture on non-target device, this is called cross compilation. Currently we support Raspberry Pi 3B for armv7 architecture with Rust's cross compilation toolchain called cargo cross.

To install cargo cross:

cargo install cross

Linux packaging (optional)

We use nfpm to build our linux packages (deb, rpm and apk).

Follow the nfpm install instructions to install the dependency. The linux packages will automatically be built when running just release.

just release

The virtual packages (e.g. tedge-full and tedge-minimal) can be built using the following command:

just release-linux-virtual

Compiling

To build thin-edge.io we are using cargo.

As we are using cargo workspace for all our crates. All compiled files are put in ./target/ directory with target's name eg: ./target/debug or ./target/release for native builds and for cross compiled targets ./target/<architecture>/debug or ./target/<architecture>/release dependent on the target of the build.

Compiling dev

To compile dev profile (with debug symbols) we use following command:

cargo build

Build artifacts can be found in ./target/debug and will include executables:

ls -l ./target/debug/tedge*

Output

-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge
-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge-mapper

Binaries can be run eg: ./target/debug/tedge. Alternatively, you can use cargo to build and run executable in a single command:

cargo run --bin tedge

Compiling release

To compile release profile we use following command:

cargo build --release

Build artifacts can be found in ./target/release and will include executables:

ls -l ./target/release/tedge*

Output

-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge
-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge-mapper

Binaries can be run eg: ./target/release/tedge.

Building deb package

Currently thin-edge.io contains 2 binaries, tedge (cli) and tedge-mapper which are packaged as separate debian packages. To create following commands are to be issued:

cargo deb -p tedge
cargo deb -p tedge-mapper

All resulting packages are going to be in: ./target/debian/ directory:

ls -l ./target/debian

Output

total 2948
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge_0.9.0_amd64.deb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge-mapper_0.9.0_amd64.deb

Cross compiling

To create binaries which can run on different platform than one you are currently on you can use cargo cross:

cross build --target armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

Build artifacts can be found in ./target/armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/debug and will include executables:

ls -l ./target/armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/debug/tedge*

Output

-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge
-rwxrwxr-x   2 user user 11111 Jan 1 00:00 tedge-mapper

To cross compile release version of the binaries just add --release to the above command like so:

cross build --target armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --release

Running tests

When contributing to thin-edge.io we ask you to write tests for the code you have written. The tests will be run by build pipeline when you create pull request, but you can easily run all the tests when you are developing with following command:

cargo test

This will run all tests from the repository and sometime may take long time, cargo allows you to run specific test or set of tests for binary:

cargo test --bin tedge