Category: Deno

building deno 1.44.0 with rust 1.78 on a raspberry pi 5

whbeebe
Deno built with Rust

Rust 1.78 is available for this platform, so we’ll build Deno from its sources via Rust.

First, if you haven’t already, install Rust following the very simple directions on the Rust website ( https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started ). Be advised that you’ll need to install curl and protobuf-compiler; the first to handle the installation of Rust, and the second to handle the build of deno. You should install these two packages before installing Rust and then using Rust to build deno.

After installing the two packages mentioned earlier and then installing Rust, perform cargo install deno and then go away for about 45 minutes until it’s done.

Why do it this way? First because you should install Rust, and install it locally to your login account, not globally. Second, because once again if you use apt to install rust, you only get version 1.74, not the current 1.78 stable release. When you install rust using the website’s method, you also get rustup, which allows you to keep your copy of Rust up-to-date. And if you want to do any kernel development you’ll need an up-to-date kernel (which you do have) and versions of Rust greater than or equal to version 1.77. Third, when you build deno yourself you get a whole slew of Rust crates that you can tinker with in other projects. Finally, you should use deno over node.js because the same creator of node, Ryan Dahl, is also the creator of deno; deno is far more robust and secure than node.js.

Finally, to learn more about deno and how to use it, go to https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual and have at it.

installing deno 1.40.2 via rust’s cargo on ubuntu 23.10 & raspberry pi 5

whbeebe

I have been tinkering with Deno since before I ever started tinkering with the language it’s written in, Rust. It was Deno that finally convinced me to get serious about learning the Rust language. One of the benefits of installing Rust on any system is that you can install Deno with the Rust command cargo install deno. With that, Rust/cargo will download every source file and build Deno for you.

It’s been a while since I built Deno via Rust’s cargo. Once it’s installed you can run deno upgrade and it will pull down the latest release and install it for you. That works pretty well for any supported environment, unless you’re using Ubuntu 23.10 on a Raspberry Pi 5. If you try to install Deno the officially documented way, you get the following:

Error: Official Deno builds for Linux aarch64 are not available.

Which means you’re going to build it from source. Fortunately Rust is available for this environment or else this post wouldn’t be here.

While building Deno I did run into one significant problem. The build failed right in the middle:

Rust build error of Deno

A little bit of search led me to install protoc via sudo apt install protobuf-compiler. Once installed I followed the directions about setting CARGO_TARGET_DIR and restarted the build, which then went on to build successfully. I checked for life:

$ which deno/home/pi/.cargo/bin/deno$ deno --versiondeno 1.40.2 (release, aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu)v8 12.1.285.6typescript 5.3.3

And now I’m the proud “owner” of Deno on this Raspberry Pi 5. By the way, if you want to see how the Raspberry Pi handled the task, here’s a taste of it via btop:

btop showing Rust cargo build of Deno on a Raspberry Pi 5

You’ll note that all four cores on the processor are running 100%, yet the temperature was around 60°C. This shows how well the active cooling is working on the Raspberry Pi 5.