Building logstash-forwarder v0.3.0 for armhf

Go / Logstash / Cross-compiling

(or, I really should learn more about this ‘Go’ thing)

The wonders of Logstash is a subject for a future blog post, but in the mean time the following are my notes for building logstash-forwarder to run on an armhf device (specifically, a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian). These instructions assume a modern Linux machine (I run Ubuntu 14.04).

UPDATE: These instructions work for logstash-forwarder 0.3.0, not the latest 0.4.0. I will try to update them for 0.4.0 at some point

Install Go from source1 .

This is not nearly as intimidating as it sounds, and shouldn’t take much longer than 10 minutes on a moderately powerful system. You will probably require the usual build-essential stuff to make this work. Download and build go itself

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/go
cd go/src
./all.bash

Then grab the cross-compile scripts off GitHub, and build for all supported platforms (or just Linux/arm if you are in a serious hurry)

git clone git://github.com/davecheney/golang-crosscompile.git
source golang-crosscompile/crosscompile.bash
go-crosscompile-build-all

Add your freshly minted go to your path

export PATH=`pwd`/bin:$PATH

Clone the logstash-forwarder source off GitHub

git clone https://github.com/elasticsearch/logstash-forwarder.git
git checkout e12e3415f2c0baf1519419cca741f4a02e47ea7b</pre>

Edit the Makefile2

  1. Comment out go-check target ~L21, this target checks which version of Go you are using by running ‘go version’ and grepping for go1.3, but because we are running a version of Go compiled from source, it doesn’t have this version stamp
  2. Add ‘-a armhf’ to the call to fpm in the ‘rpm’ and ‘deb’ targets (L49) so the resulting packages declare the right platform

Build the package

Logstash-forwarder uses fpm to package up the compiled program, so install it, then:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm make deb

To compile logstash-forwarder and build a Debian package3

Notes

  1. Based off Dave Cheney’s instructions, found here
  2. Or apply the diff from here
  3. In theory ‘make rpm’ should build a rpm, but I haven’t tested this