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.
