31. March 2022

How to develop for ESP32-C3 with Rust on macOS with Podman using Dev Container in VS Code

Development in Dev Containers using VS Code greatly simplifies bootstrapping of the development environment. The developer does not need to install toolchains locally and spends a lot of time composing the development environment.

The default installation of VS Code is configured to work with Docker. It requires some small additional steps to switch to Podman.

Let’s begin with development using examples from Ferrous Systems training:

git clone https://github.com/ferrous-systems/espressif-trainings.git

Install Podman and check version:

brew install podman
podman --version

The version should be at least 4.0. If you have a previous version, consider an upgrade.

Following step might not be obvious to Docker users. Docker creates VM for managing containers in the background without asking the user. In the case of Podman, this is more versatile and you can define what kind of machine do you want to create. Here are a few options recommended for development, when you omit them you’ll get smaller defaults.

podman machine init --disk-size 20 --cpus 8 -m 4096 -v ${HOME}/espressif-trainings:${HOME}/espressif-trainings
podman machine start

Please, notice also -v option which mounts the development directory to Podman VM, without this mount you’ll get:

Error: statfs espressif-trainings: no such file or directory

Now the Podman VM should be ready and we can spin up containers. Go to the project directory and open Visual Studio Code:

cd ${HOME}/espressif-trainings
code .

It’s necessary to install one additional dependency for Podman: podman-compose

pip3 install podman-compose

It’s necessary to tell VS Code to use podman instead of docker commands. Go into Settings and search for keyword docker. Replace docker by podman and docker-compose by podman-compose.

VS Code is ready and click Reopen in Container.

Pulling the base image might take a while.

Open terminal and build the first ESP32-C3 example:

cd intro/hardware-check
cp cfg.toml.example cfg.toml
cargo build

Note: If VS Code is complaining about existing vscode volume, it’s possible to remove it by command

podman volume rm vscode

Note 2: If the remove is blocked by the existing terminated container, it’s possible to clean the reference by command

podman container prune

Flashing of the resulting file could be done by espflash and mounting device to Podman or using the tool like Adafruit WebSerial ESPTool. The file for flashing is located in the directory target/release.

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20. April 2021

How to statically link Rust application for Windows

Rust compiler can generate a single binary that contains all dependencies. This is a great feature for creating stand-alone tools or tools for containers.

There is one gotcha for Windows which does not appear on a developer’s machine. When you move the application to a brand new installation of Windows or you try to start the in Windows Docker Container which contains Windows for Datacenters the app won’t start.

Why? The system is missing Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015-2019 (vc_redist) which you can download from microsoft.com.

It’s quite inconvenient to force the user to install the package in the case of a stand-alone Rust tool. The package installation even requires elevation of privileges.

The alternative approach to distributing vc_redist is to statically link CRT library into the application. It will result in a slightly bigger application around +100KB.

It’s necessary to tell rustc to perform static linking of CRT.

In the project create file .cargo/config.toml:

[target.x86_64-pc-windows-msvc]
rustflags = ["-C", "target-feature=+crt-static"]

Rebuild the application and the new binary is statically linked and can run even on Windows 8 without vc_redist.

The interesting part is how to determine the proper target name which is on the first line of the example configuration. Many examples on the internet are referring to target.i686-pc-windows-msvc which does not work. Use the following command to determine parts of the name of the target:

rustc --print cfg
target_arch="x86_64"
target_endian="little"
target_env="msvc"
target_family="windows"
target_feature="fxsr"
target_feature="sse"
target_feature="sse2"
target_os="windows"
target_pointer_width="64"
target_vendor="pc"
windows

The target name is composed of values on the lines above.

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24. March 2021

How to download binary file in Rust by reqwest

reqwest in Rust allows you to download file. The question is how to store the file on the filesystem. There are several examples on the internet where authors are calling .text() which will result in a corrupted file on the filesystem because text() is decoding UTF-8 characters.

Here is an example of how to download a binary file and store content in a file on the local file system.

File download.rs:

use std::io::Cursor;
type Result<T> = std::result::Result<T, Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>>;

async fn fetch_url(url: String, file_name: String) -> Result<()> {
    let response = reqwest::get(url).await?;
    let mut file = std::fs::File::create(file_name)?;
    let mut content =  Cursor::new(response.bytes().await?);
    std::io::copy(&mut content, &mut file)?;
    Ok(())
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    fetch_url("https://georgik.rocks/wp-content/uploads/sianim.gif".to_string(), "siriel.gif".to_string()).await.unwrap();
}

File Cargo.toml:

[package]
name = "download"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Georgik.Rocks"]
edition = "2018"

[dependencies]
reqwest = "*"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

[[bin]]
name = "download"
path = "download.rs"

To build the example type following:

cargo run

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