Cloudron on a Raspberry pi?

[Lonkle]

@malvim Wish I had my Pi now so I could help test! Soon tho. ️

[malvim]

Hey, @Lonk! You mind testing this on your laptop? I'm not getting these errors only on the Pi, I'm getting them on my amd64 laptop and amd64 server as well!

Repo is here: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/postgresql-addon, it's just a matter of:

• cloning it;
• building the image locally (docker build -t cloudron/postgresqladdontest .)
• installing dependencies (npm install)
• running the test (npm test)

Could you run this somewhere and see if you have the same problem?

Thanks!

[malvim]

MAN, it seems I'm running into ALL KINDS of weird problems hahaha!

I started going into postgresql node client's code, and it seemed to be some weird behavior of EventEmitter, which was weird...

I installed nvm and tested with older node distributions, and it ran fine on my laptop! So it seems, @girish, that the test code for postgresql-addon does not run with node v14 or later on my machines. Tested with v12 and v13 and it was all fine. What version are you using for tests?

Moving on to the next hurdle, I guess hahah!

[girish]

@malvim said in Cloudron on a Raspberry pi?:

So it seems, @girish, that the test code for postgresql-addon does not run with node v14 or later on my machines

Aha! I feel like I have hit this issue before. Indeed, when we updated the box code to use node 14 lots of things fail (not sure why). We use node 10.18.1 everywhere. This is why the hotfix and code enforces it. For future reference, always use the node in scripts/createReleaseTarball in the box repo.

[malvim]

@girish okay, cool, I'll use that. It's good news, then, that the OTHER tests even ran!

So, for what it's worth, the code seemed to fail on the use of EventEmitter. A class was dispatching an event and the corresponding listener was not triggered, so if you ever need to investigate further, maybe that's a start.

[nebulon]

I have ordered a RaspberryPi 4 now as well and plan to use that as a home server, so hopefully we can get this supported well in the future Very curious to get my hands on what you have already managed to get working!

[robi]

There's the new keyboard that includes an rPi inside too.

[nebulon]

@malvim I've also got a Raspberry Pi 4 now. Can you give an update on where you are and do you have forked repos with arm changes somewhere?

[nebulon]

To give a short update from my side, with the information already posted here, I was able to get the box (the main Cloudron controller process) up and running on the Pi 4 as well as successfully install Cloudron as such. I have only just started on the base image and the other addons, so any patches here are welcome.

To collect the changes, I am creating arm64 branches in the relevant repos, for example https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/commits/arm64 and https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docker-base-image/-/commits/arm64

On top of this, I am trying to implement a better provisioning workflow for development, this is similar to the hotfix, so it is still aimed towards developers porting stuff to arm. More info on this later.

[Lonkle]

@nebulon So quickly! Nice work.

I want to convert my app to run on ARM so I'll be getting the same board you got to verify the OpenVPN Client and all of its features are able to work in an ARM environment.

This is so cool, love ARM.

[nebulon]

Well it really remains to be seen how powerful such a board is to run common apps through docker

[Lonkle]

@nebulon True, but even if it could run 1. Not even that well, imagine a future with the Rasberry Pi 8. ARM CPUs are getting insane.

[mehdi]

@nebulon said in Cloudron on a Raspberry pi?:

Well it really remains to be seen how powerful such a board is to run common apps through docker

I'm running like 4 containers on my Raspberry pi at home, it's super smooth, and it's only a RPi 2 ! The RPi 4 is gonna be more than capable of running a few apps for home usage I think

[malvim]

@nebulon Great work!

I got really caught up with work and personal stuff over the last weeks, so I was not able to keep on working.

On most addon repos, I was creating arm64 branches as well, but most of them were just a matter of changing the base image to not have the hash. I was using cloudron/baseimage and building it on the pi itself before trying to install cloudron, so I had it tagged locally with that name, and others wouldn't download from docker hub, using the local arm64 one instead.

I'll search for any changes I have made over here, but they're not a lot.

I'll post a suymmary tonight.

[nebulon]

@malvim right, it was same route for me then. I have just managed to get all addons and nextcloud to run. The notes here about mongodb were helpful!

Overall I don't think it will be included in the next release though, maybe as something experimental, but while we have a proof-of-concept now, it will still take quite some time to actually make it proper and of course all apps have to be rebuilt...

[Lonkle]

@nebulon Let me know when you send are finished with your branch (and how we'd build it differently) and I'll make sure my OpenVPN Client is ready!

[girish]

@lonk Can you make a new post for the VPN Client with the current status? I would like to discuss a bit whether it should be part of the Cloudron box code or an app.

[Lonkle]

@girish On it.

[Lonkle]

@malvim / @nebulon - I just picked up a Raspberry Pi, I'm going to start working on this myself. Have either of you gotten any further since your last posts in Nov?

[nebulon]

@lonk I basically got this working already, there are only a few changes required to make the base system work. That is very minor and has more to do with Ubuntu setup rather than our code base.

However the main reason we have not pursued this further is, that in order to support arm (arm64 to be precise), we have to rebuild all addon docker images for a start and patch up the code which creates addon container accordingly with different image tags and even once that is done, we then have to rebuild all app packages for arm as well, which means a lot of testing and potentially fixing apps upstream. This is a lot of work and this has to be done and tested for every app package update of course.

To give one simple example, any app using the go language, where we take the release builds, has to get some logic or separate Dockerfile to deal with arm.

I do think it is worth it in the long run to support arm, also because VPS provider start adding arm options and at least the raspberrypi 400 showed okish performance while I was doing the proof-of-concept, however we will need a different way to build packages and run the selenium tests for both architectures reliably. This is currently done manually by us due to the lack of such CI/CD pipelines in place.

So all this is certainly doable but unless we see higher demand, it is hard to justify the extra work and for the time being essentially at least double the work per app update.