Cross-compiling Node.js for ARM6 (Raspberry Pi)

NodeJS is available pre-compiled for a few Linux distributions: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager

Since NodeJS is still in testing phase for Debian, in order to install NodeJS on my Raspberry Pi under Debian wheezy, I do:

sudo su
echo deb ftp://ftp.dk.debian.org/debian/ sid main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list
apt-get update
apt-get install nodejs
rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid.list
apt-get update
exit

NodeJS works very fine and stable on my Raspberry Pi.

Just a note - this worked great for me but didn't install NPM. So if you want NPM (which you most assuredly do I would think) make sure to run

apt-get install npm

after installing node before you remove the update locations from the update list.

I've been working on this a bit since the question was originally asked, even added some patches to help auto-detect cross-compiler settings. Node.js in the repositories is (at the moment) a rather old version, and may or may not support the full hard-float (VFP) architecture.

For a full detailed HOWTO, see Nathan Rajlich's write up at http://n8.io/cross-compiling-nodejs-v0.8/

I've posted binaries for others who don't want to go through all this hassle for the same hardware at https://gist.github.com/3245130

Here's the script I wrote to automatically cross compile NodeJS for ARMv6 (Raspbery Pi) using Jenkins.

https://gist.github.com/hertzg/12c2d7fc40f68ff6deeb

I've used @Adam M-W's 'packing' snippet

The script will automatically download everything required and start building.

Just note that current (v0.10.30) version will not compile due to this issue: https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/8062#issuecomment-52541037

Run with _PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL=http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.29/node-v0.10.29.tar.gz to get the latest cross compile-able version.

#!/bin/bash

set -e
set -x

### IF we dont have archive url prefix
if [ -z "$_PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL" ]; then
    _PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL=$(wget -qO- http://nodejs.org/dist/latest/ | egrep -o 'node-v[0-9\.]+.tar.gz' | tail -1);
    _PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL="http://nodejs.org/dist/latest/"$_PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL
fi

if [ -z "$_PRAMS_RPI_TOOLS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL" ]; then
    _PRAMS_RPI_TOOLS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL="https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools/archive/master.tar.gz"
fi;

NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME=$(basename $_PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL)
NODEJS_SOURCE_DIRECTORY=${NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME%.tar.gz}
#Download NodeJS
echo "-> Searching for NodeJS "$NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME;
if [ ! -e "$PWD/$NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME" ]; then
    echo "--> Downloading from "$_PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL;
    wget --no-check-certificate -O $NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME $_PARAMS_NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL
    echo "--> Download finished!"
fi;

echo "--> Extracting"
rm -rf $NODEJS_SOURCE_DIRECTORY
tar --overwrite -xf $NODEJS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_FILENAME

echo "--> Linking"
ln -snf "$PWD/$NODEJS_SOURCE_DIRECTORY" "$PWD/node"
echo "-> Done!"


echo "-> Searching Raspberry Pi Toolset";
if [ ! -d "$PWD/rpi" ]; then

    if [ ! -e "$PWD/rpi-tools.tar.gz" ] || [ -s "$PWD/rpi-tools.tar.gz" ]; then
        echo "--> Downloading from "$_PRAMS_RPI_TOOLS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL
        wget --no-check-certificate -O "rpi-tools.tar.gz" $_PRAMS_RPI_TOOLS_SOURCE_ARCHIVE_URL
        echo "--> Download finished"
    else
        echo "--> Found rpi-tools.tar.gz."
    fi

    echo "--> Extracting"
    tar xf "rpi-tools.tar.gz"
    echo "--> Linking tools-master to rpi"
    ln -snf "$PWD/tools-master" "$PWD/rpi"
else
    echo "-> found"
fi;
echo "-> Done!"

echo "-> Cross-Compile..."

echo "--> Setup ENV"
export PATH="$PWD/rpi/arm-bcm2708/arm-bcm2708hardfp-linux-gnueabi/bin:"$PATH
export HOST="arm-bcm2708hardfp-linux-gnueabi"
export CC="${HOST}-gcc"
export CXX="${HOST}-g++"
export AR="${HOST}-ar"
export RANLIB="${HOST}-ranlib"
export LD="${HOST}-ld"
export CPP="${HOST}-gcc -E"
export STRIP="${HOST}-strip"
export OBJCOPY="${HOST}-objcopy"
export OBJDUMP="${HOST}-objdump"
export NM="${HOST}-nm"
export AS="${HOST}-as"

"${HOST}-gcc" --version
echo "--> Waiting 5s to contiue"
pushd "$PWD/node"
sleep 5

echo "--> Clean"
make clean

echo "--> Configure"
./configure --prefix=/ --without-snapshot --dest-cpu=arm --dest-os=linux

echo "--> Build"
VERSION=${NODEJS_SOURCE_DIRECTORY##node-}
export BINARYNAME=node-${VERSION}-linux-arm-armv6j-vfp-hard
mkdir ${BINARYNAME}
make install DESTDIR=${BINARYNAME} V=1 PORTABLE=1

echo "--> Pack"
cp README.md ${BINARYNAME}
cp LICENSE ${BINARYNAME}
cp ChangeLog ${BINARYNAME}
tar -czf ${BINARYNAME}.tar.gz ${BINARYNAME}

echo "--> Cleanup"
popd
mv $PWD"/node/${BINARYNAME}.tar.gz" "./"
echo "-> Done!"

I managed to cross compile nodejs version 0.10 and run it on Freescale i.MX6. I created a cross compile script to setup the environment and the execute make. The script basically just set the CC, CXX etc. variables to my cross compile tools plus it sets the arch and some other flags for the compiler. Then it runs the configure with dest-cpu=arm I tried to also link in the V8 library (which I also cross compiled), but it would not compile when I included that flag plus the path in configure. When I compile node, does it compile it's own V8, since I manage to compile without pointing to V8 library (I can see it is compiling some V8 stuff during the compilation)?

Just a heads up you can now just do:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

For node 0.12, http://conoroneill.net//download-compiled-version-of-nodejs-0120-stable-for-raspberry-pi-here has instructions + pre-built binaries.