This document will walk you through installing and running the essential EdgeX Foundry microservices on a RaspberryPi for testing and evaluation. This should not be used in a production environment. This guide is for developers who want to learn EdgeX by running it as a mock gateway device on a commonly available hobbyist device. 

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For this setup we will be using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 3 LTS specifically for the Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Download the image file for Ubuntu Server from from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/18.04.2bionic/release/ubuntu-18.04.25-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi3.img.xz,   then insert your microSD card into your computer so that you can flash the disk image onto it. If you are running Ubuntu or any other Linux distro, you can flash the image using this command:

xzcat ubuntu-18.04.25-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi3.img.xz | sudo dd bs=32M of=/dev/mmcblk0 iflag=fullblock oflag=direct status=progress; sync

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The RaspberryPi 3B+ has a full gig of ram, but while running MongoDB (and also when building from source if you choose to do so) this may not be enough. So before going any further you will first want to create some additional memory capacity by adding a swap file to your filesystem. Run the following command to create a new 2GB swap file, start swapping on it, and automatically remount the swapfile on reboot:

sudo touch /tmpvar/theswapswap
sudo chmod 600 600 /tmpvar/theswapswap
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmpvar/theswap swap bs=1M count=2048
sudo mkswap mkswap /tmpvar/theswap swap 
sudo swapon swapon /tmp/theswap

Install system dependencies

Once you have logged in, it's time to install the system dependencies needed to run EdgeX Foundry. Connect your device to your network and run the following commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade -y

sudo apt install build-essential git wget libzmq3-dev pkg-config

var/swap
sudo sh -c "echo /var/swap swap swap defaults 0 0 >> /etc/fstab"

You  may also want to be able to connect and manage your device remotely, in which case you should also install:

sudo apt install openssh-server vim-tiny

Installing EdgeX

There are three ways provided by the EdgeX Foundry to install and run the EdgeX services. We provide pre-packaged versions as a snap package (works on most Linux distros), as docker images, or you can build the EdgeX code from source and run the executables directly.

From the snap 

The easiest way to get EdgeX Foundry is to install the officially supported edgexfoundry snap from the snap store. 

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The snap contains all of the default core-* services, support-*, export-* and exportsecurity-* services though for now 

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by default only the security-* and the core-* services are enabled in the snap. To enable other services (such as export-distro in this example), use snap set:

sudo snap set edgexfoundry export-distro=on

With docker-compose

EdgeX Foundry additionally supports running via a docker-compose file from the IoTech Community Developer Kit. To run that docker-compose file, install docker:

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Then start the services with docker-compose

docker-compose up -d

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From source

Note that running EdgeX from source is not a supported way and not recommended for production.

Install system dependencies

Once you have logged in, it's time to install the system dependencies needed to run EdgeX Foundry. Connect your device to your network and run the following commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade -y

sudo apt install build-essential git wget libzmq3-dev pkg-config

Install Go & Glide

To get the exact same version of Go as used by the EdgeX, install it using the go snap (note that the project currently uses Go 1.11 for the upcoming Edinburgh release, but the Delhi release was originally built with go 1.10, however go being backwards compatible you should still be able to build the Delhi release of EdgeX with go 1.11) :

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wget https://github.com/Masterminds/glide/releases/download/v0.12.3/glide-v0.12.3-linux-arm64.tar.gz

tar -C $GOPATH/bin -xvf glide-v0.12.3-linux-arm64.tar.gz --strip 1 linux-arm64/glide

Get the EdgeX Foundry source code

Now that you have Go and Glide installed, you can tell them to fetch the EdgeX services and their dependencies:

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cd ~/go/src/github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-go

Building EdgeX Go microservices

There are two steps for building the EdgeX Go microservices, the first to prepare the build, and the second to compile it:

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If you are going to build the Delhi release of EdgeX, install glide as above and then checkout that branch:

git checkout delhi

Install and setup MongoDB

EdgeX used MongoDB for local data storage. You can install it with:

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wget https://github.com/edgexfoundry/docker-edgex-mongo/raw/master/init_mongo.js

sudo -u mongodb mongo < init_mongo.js

Test run EdgeX services

Now that you have the EdgeX go services built and all the dependencies installed and running, you can run the EdgeX services themselves. The sourcecode contains a convenient script for doing this, in the same directory as your can make build above, run:

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This will start all of the EdgeX go services and leave them running until you terminate the process (with Ctrl-C). While it's running you can make EdgeX API calls to it using the IP address of your RaspberryPi.

Make EdgeX a system service

In order to keep the EdgeX services running when you're not logged in or connected to the RaspberryPi, and to have it start automatically when it boots, you can create a SystemD service to manage it. Create a new file at /etc/systemd/system/edgex.service with the the following content:

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