Cross-Compilation

If you want to run spotifyd on lower-power hardware such as a RaspberryPi, but none of our prebuilt binaries suit your needs, you might want to cross-compile spotifyd on a more powerful machine and deploy the binary on the target system.

Using cross

The easiest way to cross-compile is using the amazing cross project. This way, the build environment comes already pre-configured. Follow the instructions in their README to install cross.

<div class="warning">

In the current latest release of cross (v0.2.5), some targets are too outdated and compilation will fail. Thus, it is currently recommended to install the latest version of cross from their git repo instead of a prebuilt binary.

</div>

Then, you should be able to run cross build --target <your desired target>, where target is one of the targets in rustc --print target-list. Please also refer to the general from source guide for additional flags that you might want to append to that command.

If this was successful, copy the resulting binary from target/<your desired target>/{release,debug}/spotifyd to the spotifyd machine and try running it there.

If cross doesn't support your target, you can try the alternative approach using Docker and QEMU below.

If compilation of your target isn't working even though cross supports it, feel free to open an issue on our GitHub or join the community matrix channel and ask there.

Using Docker and QEMU

We can also use docker to cross compile on every platform and OS that runs docker and qemu:

1. Setup a docker custom builder

   shellCopy

   docker buildx create \
     --name container-builder \
     --driver docker-container \
     --use --bootstrap
   

   If you are not using Docker-Desktop you might have to install QEMU

2. Create a docker docker-compose.yml

   Here we are building a arm64 binary, so we set platform: linux/arm64

   yamlCopy

   services:
     build-container:
       image: rust:1-bookworm
       platform: linux/arm64
       command: bash -c "
           apt-get update &&
           apt-get install -y \
             libasound2-dev \
             libssl-dev \
             jq \
             pkg-config &&
           wget -O - https://api.github.com/repos/Spotifyd/spotifyd/tarball/$(\
               curl -SsL https://api.github.com/repos/Spotifyd/spotifyd/releases/latest \
                 | jq '.tag_name' -r) \
             | tar xzv -C /spotifyd --strip-components=1 &&
           cargo build --release &&
           cp /spotifyd/target/release/spotifyd /build/"
       working_dir: /spotifyd
       volumes:
         - ./:/build
   

3. Run docker compose up

   This will copy the build spotifyd binary in the current directory.