antichris / ledobe

Build Ledger Live components in an isolated Docker environment with persistence between sessions.

LeDoBE

Ledger Live Dockerized Build Environment

Build Ledger Live components in an isolated Docker environment with persistence between sessions.

A GNU Make Makefile with a number of targets is included to simplify building some of the Ledger components, but be aware that the supported component range is very limited at the moment. Truth to be told, this entire project began with the goal of building just the Ledger Live desktop application for a Raspberry Pi 4, which is an ARM64 device that did not get any official support from @LedgerHQ at the time.

Supported platforms

At this point only ARM64 Linux is supported out of the box.

With some tinkering you should be able to make it work for other platforms. Consider submitting a pull request, if you manage to also come up with a good workflow for multiple platforms.

Scope

The scope of this project is limited to providing a stable and isolated build environment. You are welcome to contribute reports and/or solutions for any issues that you encounter during builds.

Any issue that you encounter during the runtime of the build artifacts (see Troubleshooting) falls outside the scope of this project, unless you are able to trace it back to a specific problem with this build environment. In which case, as stated previously, your contribution of issue reports/resolutions is very welcome.

Installation

Requirements

• Docker (tested with v18.09.1+)

Recommended

• A POSIX compliant shell

Process

Once you have the LeDoBE source code (that is available at https://github.com/antichris/ledobe), either

• run

   bin/build

• or build an image from the included docker directory:

   docker build -t ledobe docker

  You can replace ledobe with a tag of your choosing, just be consistent in all invocations from here on.

Operation

TL;DR

bin/run make

If you find that your builds are taking a flippin' forever, have a look-see at the section on jobs.

Details

Starting Containers

The bin/run creates directories to persist your build data and spins up and attaches to a container. You can also do this manually:

mkdir home build
docker run -it --rm \
	-v"$(readlink -f home):/mnt/ledobe" \
	-v"$(readlink -f build):/build" \
	ledobe

Building stuff

Containers run bash shell by default, which is where you would execute

make

to start building Ledger Live components. A bunch of make targets have recipes to make it way easier to build them, see the relevant section below.

Switching versions

The included Makefile has component versions listed as variables near the top. If you change any of those variables to a different commit-ish (tag, branch, exact commit, etc.) in the Git history of the corresponding component, make will automatically check out the relevant commit and rebuild the component at that version the next time you run it.

Jobs

Concurrent execution can speed up things tremendously. If you have sufficient memory (both physical and swap), you should increase make jobs up to the max threads that your device can handle. On a Raspberry Pi 4B that would be 4:

make -j4

If you don't have enough memory, but you decide to run with increased jobs anyway, expect crashes as the kernel OOM killer kicks in.

Here is an article on increasing the swap size on a Raspberry Pi.

make Targets

By default make is going to build the Ledger Live desktop application, but you can specify it a different target to build, e.g.:

make coreNPM

The following sections contain a brief overview of the explicit targets currently supported by the included Makefile.

1. desktop

   The Ledger Live desktop application. (GitHub)

   This is likely the one you are most interested in building. It having no official binaries for ARM64 (and ARM in general) served as the primary motivation for this project.

2. coreLib

   Ledger Core Library used by Ledger applications. (GitHub)

3. coreNPM

   Ledger Core Library cross-platform C++ bindings for NodeJS. (GitHub)

Troubleshooting

Building stuff

1. "No rule to make target" when building the core library

   When you switch versions, make may abort a core lib build with a message like

   make: *** No rule to make target '/build/core/lib/core/src/(some/filename).cpp', needed by '/build/.dep/coreLib/src'.  Stop.
   

   This can happen when make has cached the stats of the core lib source files used during the previous build, but some of them are missing from this new version.

   Solution: simply try again. The second run will succeed.

Running stuff

Even though the runtime portion of Ledger Live is outside the scope of this project, users have been encountering the same problems frequently enough to warrant a few words on dealing with them.

Unless you can also provide solutions that must be a part of this build environment, please, do not create additional issue reports for the Ledger Live runtime problems outlined below.

1. Missing libz.so

   error while loading shared libraries: libz.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
   

   Likely caused by AppImage/AppImageKit#964. You are welcome to contribute to its resolution.

   Two workarounds are currently known:

   • symlink /lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 to libz.so in the same directory, or
   • install the zlib1g-dev package (or the equivalent on your distribution).

2. Unable to connect the physical device

   This issue with Ledger Live seems to be common enough for their official support site to offer tips on dealing with it. If none of those work for you, consider contributing your own solution to Ledger Live.

License

The source code of this project is released under Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. See LICENSE.