Local Dev with new ARM64 Laptops

[Peter Churchill]

I recently got a new Surface Pro 11, so it is running on ARM chips

I saw this post about using this setup with Local Dev, but wasn't sure it you finally did get it working?
https://github.com/salesforcecli/plugin-lightning-dev/issues/184

I tried running sf plugins install @salesforce/plugin-lightning-dev and got this error:

 Unsupported platform: win32 arm64 LE

I am wondering if there is a workaround, and if so, if you have the steps somewhere to make it work with the new ARM64 setup?

And more broadly - any other items worth knowing about using SF CLI or IC with ARM64 I should know?

thanks!

[Scott Wells]

Hi, Peter. My daily driver is a Surface Laptop 7 with ARM64, and local development works well on it with two notable caveats:

1. Google’s Android emulator doesn’t yet work on Windows/ARM64, so you can’t start a local dev server for Android right now on ARM64.
2. I think that I had to swap out the ARM64 node.exe binary for the x64 binary temporarily while installing the local development server CLI plugin, and I was able to swap back immediately after that completed. That allows the CLI to execute using a native ARM64 build of Node.

Otherwise everything works really, really well on Windows/ARM64. It’s night-and-day vs. Windows/x64 in my experience in terms of speed and responsiveness, very similar to the difference in Macs between Intel and ARM chips.

Let me know if you hit any specific snags, but aside from the Android incompatibility — and I have other machines where I can do that if/when needed — it’s worked wonderfully for me.

Regards,
Scott Wells

​

[Peter Churchill]

Thanks as ever for quick response!

So I tried what you suggested (I think) - I downloaded the X64 node js zip from here (https://nodejs.org/en/download) and swapped the node.exe - but I got the same error. I ran this command:
node -p "process.arch" 
and it came back with X64, but not sure if I need to something different to get the PC to recognize I have changed it?

But also looking here, it sounds like you ended up having to use the NPM version of the CLI to install that plugin?
https://github.com/forcedotcom/cli/discussions/3029

So should I try that or am I just missing a step here?

[Peter Churchill]

For anyone else trying this - I had to replace the version of node.exe in the plugin folder itself (the plugin is packaged with node I guess?)

So first time I tried it failed, but once you get the error, you can see the plugin folder where it is trying to install it, so search for node.exe in there, swap in the x64 version, run it and swap it back

And voila - enable Local Dev setting and it works - with one caveat - you need to have Lighting Web Security enabled for Local Dev to work. 
First sandbox, I tried nothing happened - until I read that and tried a more recent created org with LWS enabled, and it worked great.