Building From Source
Warning
Building from source is perfectly possible, but you have to ensure all the required configuration files to run Rotonda are in the right place. If you intend to follow the Quick Tour, it is recommend to use a packaged version if possible.
If you do build from source but run into problems afterwards, refer to File-based Configuration.
In addition to meeting the system requirements, these are two things you need to build Rotonda:
a C toolchain
Rust
You can run Rotonda on any operating system and CPU architecture where you can fulfil these requirements.
Dependencies
Some of the libraries used by Rotonda require a C toolchain, most notably the MQTT client. You also need Rust because that’s the programming language that Rotonda has been written in.
C Toolchain
Some of the libraries Rotonda depends on require a C toolchain to be present. Your system probably has some easy way to install the minimum set of packages to build from C sources. For example, this command will install everything you need on Debian/Ubuntu, provided the currently logged in user has enough privileges to install system packages:
$ sudo apt install curl build-essential gcc make
If you are unsure, try to run cc on a command line. If there is a complaint about missing input files, you are probably good to go.
Rust
The Rust compiler runs on, and compiles to, a great number of platforms, though not all of them are equally supported. The official Rust Platform Support page provides an overview of the various support levels.
While some system distributions include Rust as system packages, Rotonda relies on a relatively new version of Rust, currently 1.71.0 or newer. We therefore suggest to use the canonical Rust installation via a tool called rustup.
Assuming you already have curl installed, you can install rustup and Rust by simply entering:
$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
This will install the stable rust toolchain, on a per user basis. This means that you probably want to install this as the same user as you will be running the Rotonda application itself. This should most probably be a non-root user, so we suggest you create a rotonda user, log in as that user and then perform the curl command above.
Make sure to restart your shell, or add $HOME/.cargo/bin to your $PATH enviroment variable manually. This will make sure that the tools, most notably cargo, are reachable without specifying the full path.
Alternatively, visit the Rust website for other installation methods.
Building and Updating
In Rust, a library or executable program such as Rotonda is called a crate. Crates are published on crates.io, the Rust package registry. Cargo is the Rust package manager. It is a tool that allows Rust packages to declare their various dependencies and ensure that you’ll always get a repeatable build.
Cargo fetches and builds Rotonda’s dependencies into an executable binary for your platform. By default you install from crates.io, but you can for example also install from a specific Git URL, as explained below.
Installing the latest Rotonda release from crates.io is as simple as running:
$ cargo install rotonda --version 0.3.0 --locked
The command will build Rotonda and install it in the same directory that Cargo
itself lives in, likely $HOME/.cargo/bin
. This means Rotonda will be in
your path, too. The version of Rotonda that was build corresponds to the
version of this documentation you are reading. If for any reason you want to
install another version of Rotonda, you should substitute the value after
--version
with the version you want. Omitting the whole --version`
option will install the latest published version on crates.io
.
Downloading the configuration files
Although Rotonda has a built-in configuration, and you can create a
configuration file from scratch it’s very useful to download the configuration
files that come with Rotonda. These files are situated in the github
repository of Rotonda. Provided you have a version of git higher than or
equal to 2.25 installed, you can issue these commands to download them to a
newly created directory, called rotonda
in your current working directory:
$ git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 --branch v0.3.0 https://github.com/nlnetlabs/rotonda && cd rotonda/ && git sparse-checkout set etc && git checkout v0.3.0
Again, the version of the configuration files installed here matches with the Rotonda version you just installed, and this documentation. If you’ve installed another Rotonda version, you should also substitute the two version values with the version you used when installing Rotonda.
Updating
If you want to update to the latest version of Rotonda, it’s recommended to update Rust itself as well, using:
$ rustup update
Use the --force
option to overwrite an existing version with the latest
Rotonda release:
$ cargo install --locked --force rotonda
Installing Rotonda from the main branch
All new features of Rotonda are built on a branch and merged via a pull
request, allowing you to
easily try them out using Cargo. If you want to try a specific branch from
the repository you can use the --git
and --branch
options:
$ cargo install --git https://github.com/NLnetLabs/rotonda.git --branch main
Note that you will also have to download the correct configuration files with:
$ git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 --branch main https://github.com/nlnetlabs/rotonda && cd rotonda/ && git sparse-checkout set etc && git checkout main
See also
For more installation options refer to the Cargo book.
Platform Specific Instructions
For some platforms, rustup cannot provide binary releases to install directly. The Rust Platform Support page lists several platforms where official binary releases are not available, but Rust is still guaranteed to build. For these platforms, automated tests are not run so it’s not guaranteed to produce a working build, but they often work to quite a good degree.
OpenBSD
On OpenBSD, patches are required to get Rust running correctly, but these are well maintained and offer the latest version of Rust quite quickly.
Rust can be installed on OpenBSD by running:
$ pkg_add rust