Developing on PC, deploying to PI

[TheBekker]

Is it possible to allow the package to install on x86/PC.
Since its only allowed on arm, its not really possible to develop on a pc and just pull a repo from the PI to deploy.

[Rick Waldron]

I'm not sure if this meets your needs or even helps get you closer, but I like to use rsub (which is rmate for sublime text), though I'm sure there is an alternative for whichever editor you prefer.

• https://github.com/henrikpersson/rsub
• https://github.com/textmate/rmate

[Bryan Hughes]

I use rsync myself to copy code from my Laptop to my PC. @rwaldron's method works too.

I think it depends on if you have a build stage or not. I write most of my code in TypeScript, so I always have a command to run before the code can be deployed easily, and I typically chain the two together. If you don't have a build step though, then @rwaldron's method works better.

The command I run is npm run build && raspi-tools s, which makes use of the raspi-tools helper module I wrote to make working on Raspi IO easier. The rsync command it uses under the hood is:

rsync -avz -e ssh --exclude node_modules /path/to/repo [e-mail]:/home/pi/repo

I then configure Visual Studio Code to remote debug the Raspberry Pi with the following launch.json:

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "node",
      "request": "attach",
      "name": "Debug RPi",
      "address": "ip.add.re.ss",
      "port": 9229,
      "sourceMaps": true,
      "localRoot": "${workspaceRoot}",
      "remoteRoot": "/home/pi/repo",
      "outFiles": [
        "${workspaceRoot}/dist/**/*.js"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Note: you have to start the app on the Raspberry Pi with the following command:

node --inspect-brk=ip.add.re.ss:9229 index.js

[TheBekker]

I use VS Code as well, and the the plan is typescript also, right now its just a simple POC in pure js though.

Not sure i understand the setup you use with raspi-tools ? (not much documentation to find?)

But you keep your files synced between pi and work machine?
But my specific problem still seems to be adding/installing a package like raspi-io, since im getting an error when trying to install/add on my work pc (since its not arm)?

Or do you just add to package.json and ignore that, since its gonna be build later on the pi?

[Bryan Hughes]

Or do you just add to package.json and ignore that, since its gonna be build later on the pi?

Yep. I install my dev dependencies (TypeScript, tslint, etc.) with npm install --only-dev --force, which ignores cpu warnings and skips raspi-io.

As for raspi-tools, I mostly just mentioned it for the example as I never polished it up for public consumption (no docs as you mentioned). The rsync command I mentioned is what raspi-tools does under the hood.

[TheBekker]

Ahh that makes sense, didnt know about the effects from those parameters.
Thanks alot :)

[Rick Waldron]

This has been very informative for me :D

[Andrew Nicolaou]

It's great to hear about these approaches!

I recently worked on a project that I could run on my laptop but that also used Raspi-IO when running on a Pi. For that I used npm-arch-dependencies to allow conditional installation of packages via CPU architecture.

[Bryan Hughes]

Thanks for the discussion everyone, I'm going to close this issue now since there's no tasks to be done for Raspi IO