moonfire-nvr/guide/build.md

Building Moonfire NVR

This document has notes for software developers on building Moonfire NVR from source code for development. If you just want to install precompiled binaries, see the Docker installation instructions instead.

This document doesn't spell out as many details as the installation instructions. Please ask on Moonfire NVR's issue tracker or mailing list when stuck. Please also send pull requests to improve this doc.

• Downloading
• Docker builds
  • Release procedure
• Non-Docker setup
  • Running interactively straight from the working copy
  • Running as a systemd service

Downloading

See the github page (in case you're not reading this text there already). You can download the bleeding-edge version from the commandline via git:

$ git clone https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr.git
$ cd moonfire-nvr

Docker builds

This command should prepare a deployment image for your local machine:

$ sudo docker buildx build --load --tag=moonfire-nvr -f docker/Dockerfile .

Common errors

• docker: 'buildx' is not a docker command.: You shouldn't see this with Docker 20.10. With Docker version 19.03 you'll need to prepend DOCKER_CLI_EXPERIMENTAL=enabled to docker buildx build commands. If your Docker version is older than 19.03, you'll need to upgrade.
• At least one invalid signature was encountered.: this is likely due to an error in libseccomp, as described in this askubuntu.com answer. Try running in a privileged builder. As described in docker buildx build documentation, run this command once:

  $ sudo docker buildx create --use --name insecure-builder --buildkitd-flags '--allow-insecure-entitlement security.insecure'
  

  then add --allow security.insecure to your docker buildx build commandlines.

If you want to iterate on code changes, doing a full Docker build from scratch every time will be painfully slow. You will likely find it more helpful to use the dev target. This is a self-contained developer environment which you can use from its shell via docker run or via something like Visual Studio Code's Docker plugin.

$ sudo docker buildx build \
        --load --tag=moonfire-dev --target=dev -f docker/Dockerfile .
...
$ sudo docker run \
        --rm --interactive=true --tty \
        --mount=type=bind,source=$(pwd),destination=/var/lib/moonfire-nvr/src \
        moonfire-dev

The development image overrides cargo's output directory to /var/lib/moonfire-nvr/target. (See ~moonfire-nvr/.buildrc.) This avoids using a bind filesystem for build products, which can be slow on macOS. It also means that if you sometimes compile directly on the host and sometimes within Docker, they don't trip over each other's target directories.

You can also cross-compile to a different architecture. Adding a --platform=linux/arm64/v8,linux/arm/v7,linux/amd64 argument will compile Moonfire NVR for all supported platforms. (Note: this has been used successfully for building on x86-64 and compiling to arm but not the reverse.) For the dev target, this prepares a build which executes on your local architecture and is capable of building a binary for your desired target architecture.

On the author's macOS machine with Docker desktop 3.0.4, building for multiple platforms at once will initially fail with the following error:

$ sudo docker buildx build ... --platform=linux/arm64/v8,linux/arm/v7,linux/amd64
[+] Building 0.0s (0/0)
error: multiple platforms feature is currently not supported for docker driver. Please switch to a different driver (eg. "docker buildx create --use")

Running docker buildx create --use once solves this problem, with a couple caveats:

• you'll need to specify an additional --load argument to make builds available to run locally.
• the --load argument only works for one platform at a time. With multiple platforms, it gives an error like the following:

  error: failed to solve: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = docker exporter does not currently support exporting manifest lists
  

  A comment on docker/buildx issue #59 suggests a workaround of building all three then using caching to quickly load the one of immediate interest:

  $ sudo docker buildx build --platform=linux/arm64/v8,linux/arm/v7,linux/amd64 ...
  $ sudo docker buildx build --load --platform=arm64/v8 ...
  

On Linux hosts (as opposed to when using Docker Desktop on macOS/Windows), you'll likely see errors like the ones below. The solution is to install emulators. You may need to reinstall emulators on each boot of the host.

Exec format error

Error while loading /usr/sbin/dpkg-split: No such file or directory
Error while loading /usr/sbin/dpkg-deb: No such file or directory

Moonfire NVR's Dockerfile has some built-in debugging tools:

• Each stage saves some debug info to /docker-build-debug/<stage>, and the deploy stage preserves the output from previous stages. The debug info includes:
  • output (stdout + stderr) from the build script, running long operations through the time command.
  • find -ls output on cache mounts before and after.
• Each stage accepts a INVALIDATE_CACHE_<stage> argument. You can use eg --build-arg=INVALIDATE_CACHE_BUILD_SERVER=$(date +%s) to force the build-server stage to be rebuilt rather than use cached Docker layers.

Release procedure

Releases are currently a bit manual. From a completely clean git work tree,

1. manually verify the current commit is pushed to github's master branch and has a green checkmark indicating CI passed.
2. update version in CHANGELOG.md.
3. run commands:

   VERSION=x.y.z
   git commit -am "prepare version ${VERSION}"
   git tag -a "v${VERSION}" -m "version ${VERSION}"
   ./release.bash
   git push
   git push origin "v${VERSION}"
   

The release.bash script needs jq installed to work.

Non-Docker setup

You may prefer building without Docker on the host. Moonfire NVR should run natively on any Unix-like system. It's been tested on Linux and macOS. (In theory Windows Subsystem for Linux should also work. Please speak up if you try it.)

On macOS systems native builds may be noticeably faster than using Docker's Linux VM and filesystem overlay.

To build the server, you will need the following C libraries installed:

• SQLite3, at least version 3.8.2. (You can skip this if you compile with --features=bundled and don't mind the moonfire-nvr sql command not working.)

• ncursesw, the UTF-8 version of the ncurses library.

To build the UI, you'll need a nodejs release in "Maintenance" or "LTS" status: currently v14, v16, or v18.

On recent Ubuntu or Raspbian Linux, the following command will install most non-Rust dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install \
               build-essential \
               libncurses-dev \
               libsqlite3-dev \
               pkgconf \
               sqlite3 \
               tzdata

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (still popular, supported by Ubuntu until April 2025) bundles node 10, which has reached end-of-life (see node.js: releases). So rather than install the nodejs and npm packages from the built-in repository, see Installing Node.js via package manager.

On macOS with Homebrew and Xcode installed, try the following command:

$ brew install node

Next, you need Rust 1.65+ and Cargo. The easiest way to install them is by following the instructions at rustup.rs. Avoid your Linux distribution's Rust packages, which tend to be too old. (At least on Debian-based systems; Arch and Gentoo might be okay.)

Once prerequisites are installed, you can build the server and find it in target/release/moonfire-nvr:

$ cd server
$ cargo test
$ cargo build --release
$ sudo install -m 755 target/release/moonfire-nvr /usr/local/bin
$ cd ..

You can build the UI via npm and find it in the ui/build directory:

$ cd ui
$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ cd ..
$ sudo rsync --recursive --delete --chmod=D755,F644 ui/build/ /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr/ui

Running interactively straight from the working copy

The author finds it convenient for local development to set up symlinks so that the binaries in the working copy will run via just nvr:

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo ln -s `pwd`/ui/build /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr/ui
$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo chown $USER: /var/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ ln -s `pwd`/server/target/release/moonfire-nvr $HOME/bin/moonfire-nvr 
$ ln -s moonfire-nvr $HOME/bin/nvr
$ nvr init
$ nvr config
$ nvr run

(Alternatively, you could symlink to target/debug/moonfire-nvr and compile with cargo build rather than cargo build --release, for a faster build cycle and slower performance.)

Note this nvr is a little different than the nvr shell script you create when following the install instructions. With that shell wrapper, nvr run will create and run a detached Docker container with some extra arguments specified in the script. This nvr run will directly run from the terminal, with no extra arguments, until you abort with Ctrl-C. Likewise, some of the shell script's subcommands that wrap Docker (start, stop, and logs) have no parallel with this nvr.

Running as a systemd service

If you want to deploy a non-Docker build on Linux, you may want to use systemd. Create /etc/systemd/system/moonfire-nvr.service:

[Unit]
Description=Moonfire NVR
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/moonfire-nvr run
Environment=TZ=:/etc/localtime
Environment=MOONFIRE_FORMAT=google-systemd
Environment=MOONFIRE_LOG=info
Environment=RUST_BACKTRACE=1
Type=simple
User=moonfire-nvr
Restart=on-failure
CPUAccounting=true
MemoryAccounting=true
BlockIOAccounting=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You'll also need a /etc/moonfire-nvr.toml:

[[binds]]
ipv4 = "0.0.0.0:8080"
allowUnauthenticatedPermissions = { viewVideo = true }

[[binds]]
unix = "/var/lib/moonfire-nvr/sock"
ownUidIsPrivileged = true

Note this configuration is insecure. You can change that via replacing the allowUnauthenticatedPermissions here as described in Securing Moonfire NVR and exposing it to the Internet.

See ref/config.md for more about /etc/moonfire-nvr.toml.

Some handy commands:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload                                  # reload configuration files
$ sudo systemctl start moonfire-nvr                             # start the service now
$ sudo systemctl stop moonfire-nvr                              # stop the service now (but don't wait for it finish stopping)
$ sudo systemctl status moonfire-nvr                            # show if the service is running and the last few log lines
$ sudo systemctl enable moonfire-nvr                            # start the service on boot
$ sudo systemctl disable moonfire-nvr                           # don't start the service on boot
$ sudo journalctl --unit=moonfire-nvr --since='-5 min' --follow # look at recent logs and await more

See the systemd documentation for more information. The manual pages for systemd.service and systemctl may be of particular interest.