Wechaty Docker Multi-Platform for Raspberry Pi (ARM)

For a long time, wechaty docker image was build for platform amd64. Today, Wechaty is supporting new platform: Raspberry Pi (ARM)!

TL;DR

Start from Wechaty version 1.11, you can use the Wechaty docker image directly with the Raspberry Pi!

$ uname -m
arm64

$ docker run --rm -it wechaty/wechaty:1.11 bot.ts
# It just works!

Technical Details

The story begin with https://github.com/wechaty/wechaty-puppet-wechat/pull/102 which let us know that some community users can start running wechaty-puppet-wechat and wechaty-puppet-whatsapp on Raspberry Pi.

At the same time, from this GitHub action script, we know how to build and publish multiple platform docker images.

So we decide to support multi-platform for Wechaty, and now it comes from the community.

Great thanks @Yc-Chen who has sent PR #2306 to support multi-platform docker image by fixing the compatible issue with the Google Chrome.

Finally, we can support multi-platform docker image for Wechaty by adding the following steps:

1. Enable QEMU & buildx in GitHub Actions

  - name: Set up QEMU
    uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@v1
    with:
      platforms: all

  # https://github.com/docker/setup-buildx-action
  - name: Set up Docker Buildx
    uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1
    with:
      install: true
      version: latest

2. Use buildx in our build script

We will use buildx to build multi-platform docker image for Wechaty in our scripts/docker.sh:

docker buildx build \
  --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64,linux/arm/v7 \
  --tag "wechaty/wechaty:next" \
  --push \
  .

1. --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64,linux/arm/v7 means we will build for those platforms
2. --push means we will push the multi-platforms image to Docker Hub

3. Increase the TAP timeout

The buildx seems to work perfectly, but the arm arch will take almost 10X times than the x86_64 when we are building:

For npm install:

 => [linux/amd64  6/13] RUN  npm install   && rm -fr /tmp/* ~/.npm  185.1s
 => [linux/arm64  6/13] RUN  npm install   && rm -fr /tmp/* ~/.npm  1473.2s
 => [linux/arm/v7 6/13] RUN  npm install   && rm -fr /tmp/* ~/.npm  1469.4s

For npm test:

 => [linux/amd64  9/13] RUN  npm test   && npm run dist   && npm link   165.5s
 => [linux/arm64  9/13] RUN  npm test   && npm run dist   && npm link   1482.5s
 => [linux/arm/v7 9/13] RUN  npm test   && npm run dist   && npm link   1295.2s

For puppet-install:

 => [linux/amd64  10/13] RUN  npm run puppet-install  113.3s
 => [linux/arm64  10/13] RUN  npm run puppet-install  219.1s
 => [linux/arm/v7 10/13] RUN  npm run puppet-install  444.4s

So we have to increase the TAP_TIMEOUT from the 60 seconds (the default) to 600 seconds, to make sure the unit tests are finished in time.

Total GitHub Action will take about 1.5 hours to finish building and pushing multi-platform docker image for Wechaty:

Deploy to DockerHub: 1h 38m 49s

Published: Multi-arch enable Docker Image

$ docker pull wechaty/wechaty:1.11

OS/ARCH         COMPRESSED SIZE 
linux/amd64     958.55 MB
linux/arm64     667.1 MB
linux/arm/v7    871.55 MB

Related issues/links

• Build docker image on arm64, @Yc-Chen, wechaty/wechaty#2306
• Build & deploy Wechaty docker image with arm64 multi platform support wechaty/wechaty#2248
• Use docker buildx to add arm platform to our docker image huan/docker-simple-mail-forwarder#76
• Running and Building ARM Docker Containers on x86
• Pull docker image for different architecture

Image credit: Docker Multi-Platform Images