Cross-compiling Node-RED 0.10.10 on Openembedded Yocto project LINUX

[Jeff Hatch]

I'm running into some difficulty building Node-RED 0.10.10 for an ARM 

architecture project.  I am trying to build using the Openembedded Yocto core

to cross-compile the firmware for the project I am working on.  There are some 

custom modifications that we have made to Node-RED, primarily adding our own 

nodes integrated for our hardware.  These changes have been integrated using 

diffs applied to the code from GitHub.  Due to these changes, I need to follow 

the development procedure:

# git clone https://github.com/node-red/node-red.git

# cd node-red

# npm install

# sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

# grunt build

# node red

Previously the build was using "npm install --production" and built 

successfully, and Node-RED would run just fine on our ARM based product.  This 

is no longer sufficient for building and running Node-RED 0.10.10 in the manner

we wish to build and install it because it appears that the build is now

generating files taht don't get created with "npm install --production".  I am 

presuming that Node-RED 0.11.1 will have the same requirement(s).  Is this 

correct?  

There is a command in the Yocto project bitbake recipes called oe_runnpm that

allows the running of npm commands in the build with the appropriate 

environment all set up.  This is not working with the "grunt build".  Whether 

grunt is installed locally or globally the following error indicating that, 

from what I can tell, grunt is using the build server architecture instead of 

the cross-compile ARM architecture occurs:

ERROR: QA Issue: Architecture did not match (40 to 62) on /work/arm926ejste-mlinux-linux-gnueabi/node-red/0.10.4-r47/packages-split/node-red/opt/node-red/node_modules/grunt-sass/node_modules/node-sass/vendor/linux-x64-11/binding.node

I am not very familiar with this grunt utility.  Is there any guidance or an

alternative that you could give me that might work to get this build to

succeed?  This error is related to grunt-sass which requires node-sass, which

requires libsass.  Is it possible that grunt-sass might not be necessary?

Thank You,

Jeff Hatch

[Nicholas O'Leary]

Hi Jeff,

as you've noted, around node-red 0.10.10 we introduced a build step to take the code in git and build the 'executable' version. It is this executable version we publish to the npm repository, so if you simply "npm install node-red" you get a built, working install that doesn't require grunt or any of the other build dependencies.

What customisations are you making? If its simply adding nodes to the palette, there's no reason to modify the code - if you package them as npm modules (as described here: http://nodered.org/docs/creating-nodes/packaging.html) you can simply install them alongside the node-red module and they will get picked up.

If you are making modifications to the runtime source code itself, you can continue to do so, just update your patch to apply to the result of "npm install node-red" rather than the git clone.

Nick

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[Jeff Hatch]

Nick,

Thank you for your quick response.  I am going to create nodes and node modules for all of our node based code and add them to the "executable" version during our install.  By "install them alongside the node-red module" are you referring to installing them in the nodes and node_modules directory?  I don't think that I will be able to put the nodes and node modules out on github at this time.  The way that things were "modified" in our build/deploy environment previously, they created a repo with the nodes and node modules in the node-red repo, right along side all the "stock" nodes and node modules.  This worked, but gets messy when we want to do an upgrade of the base node-red package.

Thank you again for the recommendation.

Jeff

[Dave C-J]

Jeff
no need to put them "out" on Github if you don't want to. However if you do wrap them properly (as if you were going to) - http://nodered.org/docs/creating-nodes/packaging.html
then use
npm pack
locally it will create a tgz - that you can keep locally and then use
npm install {your_packed_node}.tgz
or
npm install http://{your build server}/{some directory}/{your packed node}.tgz

hopefully that will help.

[Jeff Hatch]

Thanks Dave.  I think our code is a ways from prime time for posting it to github (too many couplings with our hardware at this time), but at least we can be prepared in case we ever do.

Jeff