Raspberry PI and Colyseus ( and Haxe)

Raspberry PI & Colyseus ( & Haxe )

Currently there are two basic ways to deploy my Colyseus server:

  • (Virtual) Host on premise or in the cloud
  • Docker container running on premise or in the cloud

For my Console system I wanted to run Colyseus and Haxe on a Raspberry PI.
You could use this as a low budget computer for testing purposes or use port forwarding on your router to host it to the rest of the world.

The steps below could be used to create a nodejs server and you can avoid all the extra steps to get haxe working.

For small multiplayer games or for turnbased/idle games this would be a cheap way to run a server from your home.

The procedure for a Virtual Raspberry PI (VirtualBox/XenServer) is much simpler because the x86 can work with lix.
Unfortunately I haven't managed to get lix working on the real (ARM) hardware. It defaults to an incompatible distribution.

If anyone knows how to tell lix to get the ARM based executables that would make this procedure a lot easier

Installation Steps:

Components:

  • Raspberry PI B v1.2 : 1GB Ram, 4x 1.2 Ghz Cores
  • Stretch image 2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch from https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=10376
  • Use Win32DiskImage/RUFUS to write the image to a 16GB SD card. The haxe software that we will install brings it to 14 GB!

Boot raspbian (default it will use DHCP to get an IP address)
Open terminal : sudo su - (Become root)

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config 

change permitRootLogin to : permitRootLogin yes

change password for root : passwd root

Allow putty / ssh into the PI

systemctl enable ssh
systemctl start ssh

Update/upgrade

apt update
apt upgrade

rpi-update

restart the PI

Get the IP address:

ip addr show      

login as root to do the (remote) installation

cd /root
#nodejs
#curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | bash - # used for x86 version of pi
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | bash -
apt-get -y install nodejs
node -v
npm -v

You can install the node stuff for Colyseus and run the NodeJS version.

But I wanted HaXe so these are the steps we need to make before we can compile the neko and haxe versions

If you are on x86 versions you can use the serjek example github files and use ' lix download' to download the binaries.

But for now I had to compile the ARM versions:

# ---------------
# Neko / HaXe / Colyseus-hxjs 
# ---------------
# base software packages  
# execute line after line (do not copy-paste-run!)
mkdir -p ~/Development/haxe/{dev,lib,source}
cd ~/Development/haxe/source
apt-get install -y build-essential git cmake
apt-get install -y libgc-dev libgc1c2 libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
apt-get install -y apache2-dev libmariadb-client-lgpl-dev-compat    
apt-get install -y libsqlite3-0 sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev    
apt-get install -y libgtk2.0-dev
apt-get install -y libudev-dev
apt-get install -y libasound2-dev
apt-get install -y zlib1g libmariadb2 libmbedtls-dev libmbedcrypto0 libmbedtls10 libmbedx509-0
apt-get install -y m4 ocaml ocaml-native-compilers libpcre-ocaml-dev libextlib-ocaml libextlib-ocaml-dev opam
apt-get install -y openssl libssl-dev 

Interactive setup/install:

opam init
ocamlc -config|grep arch # should be arm 
#interactive:
opam install conf-m4 ocamlfind sedlex depext xml-light extlib rope ptmap sha

We are ready to install neko and haxe:

export HAXE_VERSION='4.0.0-rc.2'
export NEKO_VERSION='v2-2-0'

cd /root
eval `opam config env`
#
#Neko install
#
git clone --recursive  https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/neko -b $NEKO_VERSION
cd neko 
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DRELOCATABLE=OFF ..
make
make install

Test the neko by typing in neko and check that the version is 2.2.0

  
#
# haxe install
#  
eval `opam config env`
cd ~/Development/haxe/source
git clone --recursive https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe -b $HAXE_VERSION
cd haxe
make
make tools
make install  
  

haxe --version # should give you 4.0.0-rc.2

Setting up the libraries to run the examples

haxelib setup
# default /usr/lib/haxe/lib
 
# yarn
npm i yarn -g
yarn

# Get Haxe Libraries
cd /usr/lib/haxe/lib
# haxelib git colyseus-hxjs https://github.com/serjek/colyseus-hxjs
git clone https://github.com/serjek/colyseus-hxjs

Unfortunately I'm not good enough with haxe and lix libraries and I needed a hack to get
the colyseus-hxjs library to work with the compiled ARM versions.

Apparently the required versions are different from the default haxelib installations.
Since I know that the lix steps worked for x86 installations I used a mix of installation steps to get it to work.

npm i lix -g

cd /root
git clone https://github.com/serjek/colyseus-hxjs-examples.git
cd /root/colyseus-hxjs-examples
# We are still going to download the latest haxe_libraries but we are using the haxelib versions later
lix download
haxelib install tink_core
haxelib install tink_lang
haxelib install hxnodejs

# Now we need to copy some of the /root/haxe/haxe_libraries to the haxelib libraries:
mkdir -p /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/git/src
cp -r /root/haxe/haxe_libraries/colyseus-hxjs/0.0.0/github/*6  /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/git
mv /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/git/*6/src  /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/git/src
cp -r /root/haxe/haxe_libraries/hxnodejs/6.9.1/haxelib/src/ /usr/lib/haxe/lib/hxnodejs/10,0,0

echo "git" > /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/.current

haxelib list

With these hacked haxe libraries we can then run the steps to create node versions from the haxe code:

haxe server.hxml

cd bin/server
yarn
node index.js

You can now tell your client to connect to the examples.

My pre-alpha Stencyl Extension Server was used by myself to run the TicTacToe game.

For that I installed a webserver on the PI and uploaded both the server code and the client code to the Raspberry PI:

#
# Apache WebServer
#
apt-get install apache2
systemctl enable apache2

Copy your project to /var/www/html
and
Visit your game with a browser to the following URL: http://raspberry_pi_ip_address

You can use win32diskimage to create an image from the SD card as a back-up.

Currently trying this right now on my Android TV box converted to Armbian Debian 5.75 ($22 US, Arm64 @ 2.0gz x4, 4gb ram / 32gb rom, 1gb Ethernet)

neko compiled with no problem but haxe puked during make. Likely the differince in Armbian vs Raspbian distros but I had to install camlp4o (sudo apt-get install camlp4-extra). Haxe installed fine afterwords. Working on the rest now...

currently stuck with the following error when running haxe server.hxml

/usr/lib/haxe/lib/tink_core/1,24,0/src/tink/core/Error.hx:116: characters 9-21 : Class<Std> has no field downcast
src/MainServer.hx:3: characters 8-30 : Type not found : colyseus.server.Server

what does ' haxelib list ' show?

I had to use a mix of steps ( haxelib install and copying files) before haxe server.hxml could find all types.

~/colyseus-hxjs-examples$ haxelib list
colyseus-hxjs: [git] haxelib.json src extraParams.hxml README.md
hxnodejs: [10.0.0]
tink_core: [1.24.0]
tink_lang: [0.6.2]
tink_macro: [0.17.7]
tink_priority: [0.1.4]
tink_syntaxhub: [0.4.3]

@closetmonkey
Hmm that is a strange output of haxelib list on colyseus-hxjs

From memory (I don't have access to it now since I'm at work) the colyseus-hxjs should only have one version behind it :
colyseus-hxjs: [git]

this was used to tell haxelib what version it should use:
echo "git" > /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/.current

what is the contents of your .current file?!

Maybe you just edit the /usr/lib/haxe/lib/ (or your own haxelib path) /colyseus-hxjs/.current and make sure it only has the git in it?!

@mdotedot said in Raspberry PI and Colyseus ( and Haxe):

... /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/.current

'/usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/.current' has one line with the contents of 'git'. Interestingly, haxelib.json src extraParams.hxml README.md is the directory contents at /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/.

~/colyseus-hxjs-examples$ ls /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus-hxjs/
extraParams.hxml  git  haxelib.json  README.md  src

Unfortunately I can't confirm now on my system, but you might try to move the contents of that hxjs directory to the [git] (or copy)
So that /usr/lib/haxe/lib/colyseus/-hxjs/git has the src, haxelib.json, README.md and extraParams.hxml

And then try again haxe server.hxml

That did it, however, I now get the following errors

~/colyseus-hxjs-examples$ haxe server.hxml
/usr/lib/haxe/lib/tink_core/1,24,0/src/tink/core/Error.hx:116: characters 9-21 : Class<Std> has no field downcast
src/server/rooms/StateHandlerRoom.hx:5: characters 1-51 : Module colyseus.server.schema.Schema does not define type MapSchemaUtil
src/server/rooms/StateHandlerRoom.hx:5: characters 1-51 : For function argument 'handler'
src/MainServer.hx:7: lines 7-41 : Defined in this class

Not sure if you are mixing libraries. The stuff that I rely on is from serjek and was based on 0.10 release. There is now a 0.11 release so I hope you didn't load any of that?!

From my setup:

root@raspberrypi:~/colyseus-hxjs-examples# haxe -version

4.0.0-rc.2

root@raspberrypi:~/colyseus-hxjs-examples# haxelib list

colyseus-hxjs: [git]
hxnodejs: [10.0.0]
tink_core: [1.23.0]
tink_lang: [0.6.2]
tink_macro: [0.17.7]
tink_priority: [0.1.4]
tink_syntaxhub: [0.4.3]

root@raspberrypi:~/colyseus-hxjs-examples# cat src/colyseus/server/schema/Schema.hx | grep MapSchemaUtil

class MapSchemaUtil {

Your tink_core is different than mine. Don't know if that is the only thing that is different?