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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 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

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

Building

Moonfire NVR should run natively on any Unix-like system. It's been tested on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. (In theory Windows Subsystem for Linux should also work. Please speak up if you try it.)

To build the server, you will need SQLite3. You can skip this if compiling with --features=rusqlite/bundled and don't mind the moonfire-nvr sql command not working.

To build the UI, you'll need a nodejs release in "Maintenance", "LTS", or "Current" status on the Release Schedule: currently v18, v20, or v21.

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

$ sudo apt-get install \
               build-essential \
               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 1.79+ 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 pnpm and find it in the ui/build directory:

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

For more information about using pnpm, check out the Developing UI Guide.

If you wish to bundle the UI into the binary, you can build the UI first and then pass --features=bundled-ui when building the server. See also the release workflow which statically links SQLite and (musl-based) libc for a zero-dependencies binary.

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/dist /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.)

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 versions:
    • update server/Cargo.toml version by hand; run cargo test --workspace to update Cargo.lock.
    • ensure README.md and CHANGELOG.md refer to the new version.
  3. run commands: 
    VERSION=x.y.z
git commit -am "prepare version ${VERSION}"
git tag -a "v${VERSION}" -m "version ${VERSION}"
git push origin "v${VERSION}"

The rest should happen automatically—the tag push will fire off a GitHub Actions workflow which creates a release, cross-compiles statically compiled binaries for three different platforms, and uploads them to the release.