Feature Idea: Release arm server builds

[Johennes]

Summary

With #124 the Dockerfile can now also be used to build arm64 packages. However, the public releases only include builds for amd64 (focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz). It would be great if arm64 binaries could be included, too. This architecture is becoming more and more popular so providing builds could further contribute to Focalboard's reach.

How important this is to me and why

Importance: High (my server runs on arm64 and this prevents me from using Focalboard through e.g. Yunohost)

Use cases:

1. Install Focalboard through Yunohost (https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/focalboard_ynh/issues/51)

Additional context/similar features

None.

[wuwinson]

Thanks for the feedback @Johennes. We'll start tracking this idea here and see if we get more requests for us to prioritize this.

[sergi0g]

I would also be interested in an arm64 build. Raspberry Pis are useful for local servers, so you should support them. If you can't, you could make a docker image that runs on arm64, because the ones I have tried are very old.

[Johennes]

As a step towards enabling this, I opened https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/pull/4528 which extends the existing Dockerfile.build to support cross-compilation. Using this, my 10-year-old budget Intel laptop builds the arm64 binary of the web app in about 30 minutes.

[Johennes]

@wuwinson the PR was marked stale but it hasn't received any review yet. I'd be curious to hear the team's thoughts on the changes.

[Okazakee]

It would be nice to let it run on my rpi4, no reason to not include arm if it's not much hustle for the devs.

[lazyzyf]

please support arm64 platform in docker, so i can use it on the raspberry pi.

[sergi0g]

If you want to use it on the Raspberry Pi, you can build it yourself. You could try running this in your terminal.

git clone https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard
cd focalboard
docker build -t focalboard -f docker/Dockerfile .

I have followed the exact same procedure on my Raspberry Pi and I can confirm it works properly. You can then run your container with

docker run -it -p 80:8000 focalboard

[sergi0g]

@Okazakee

It would be nice to let it run on my rpi4, no reason to not include arm if it's not much hustle for the devs.

Focalboard's native builds happen through Github Actions. Making the action build a native app for arm64 would require an arm64 runner or building with docker and then retrieving the built app for arm. Creating such an action is not trivial and would require extensive testing to make sure a native arm64 build works as intended. You should probably try using docker, as Mattermost probably won't add support for arm.

[Okazakee]

@Okazakee

It would be nice to let it run on my rpi4, no reason to not include arm if it's not much hustle for the devs.

Focalboard's native builds happen through Github Actions. Making the action build a native app for arm64 would require an arm64 runner or building with docker and then retrieving the built app for arm. Creating such an action is not trivial and would require extensive testing to make sure a native arm64 build works as intended. You should probably try using docker, as Mattermost probably won't add support for arm.

Maybe someone can build up a community driven repository on dockerhub with the arm build, approved by official Devs (?)

[sergi0g]

I've been having issues with Github Actions lately, so I can't set this up, but I could provide a workflow if you want to.