compile-vim-for-synology.md

⚠️ I have since created lstellway/synology-dev-env to provide a local development environment for Synology via containers. There is an included example for building vim.
 

Compile VIM for Synology NAS

Let me start by saying: this is not a happy story..
This process was a bit painful, and I definitely stumbled through it.
Would love to hear if I missed anything or if anybody has ideas.

Synology provides a package developer guide. I primariliy referenced the prepare environment and your first package sections.

Local environment

I decided to run my environment using Docker compose. Note the synology-dev-data volume, used to keep working data persistent in the container.

# File: `docker-compose.yml`

version: '3'
services:
  synology-dev-env:
    command: tail -f /dev/null
    container_name: synology-dev-env
    image: ubuntu:18.04
    privileged: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - synology-dev-data:/data
      - .bash_aliases:/root/.bash_aliases

volumes:
  synology-dev-data:
    name: synology-dev-data

Note the linked .bash_aliases file - I used this to create a couple convenience methods (especially for installing dependencies when starting a fresh container):

# File `.bash_aliases`

init() {
  apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

apt install -y \
    git \
    vim \
    cifs-utils \
    nodejs \
    python \
    python-pip \
    python3 \
    python3-pip
}

I also defined a Makefile to make it easy to manage the development environment:

# File `Makefile`

.PHONY: dev dev-down dev-terminal

# Run Docker compose commands against the development file
dev-compose = docker-compose --file docker-compose.yml $(1)

# Initialize the development environment
dev:
	@echo "Starting development environment..."
	$(call dev-compose, up -d)

# Stop the development environment
dev-down:
	@echo "Stopping development environment..."
	$(call dev-compose, down)

# Initialize a terminal session in the development admin container
dev-terminal:
	@echo "Initializing terminal session..."
	$(call dev-compose, exec -it synology-dev-env /bin/bash)

Container environment

I followed the directions outlined in the prepare environment doc and cloned the SynologyOpenSource/pkgscripts-ng repository to /data/toolkit/pkgscripts-ng.

Definitely encourage people to become familiar with the EnvDeploy script, but I created another convenience Makefile here:

.PHONY: package package-pack platform list-platforms platform-info
include .env

deploy-dsm = ./EnvDeploy -v ${DSM_VERSION} $(1)

package-dsm = ./PkgCreate.py -v ${DSM_VERSION} $(1)

package:
	$(call package-dsm, -p ${PLATFORM} -c ${PACKAGE})

package-pack:
	$(call package-dsm, -i -p ${PLATFORM} -c ${PACKAGE})

platform:
	$(call deploy-dsm, -p ${PLATFORM})

list-platforms:
	$(call deploy-dsm, --list)

platform-info:
	$(call deploy-dsm, --info ${PLATFORM})

Note the included .env file - I defined a couple variables there. You would need to tailor them to your DSM version and Synology processor platform.

DSM_VERSION='7.0'
PLATFORM='apollolake'

Build platform setup

I ran the command to setup the development environment for my DSM/Synology environment/platform:

make platform

This took about 5 minutes for me..

Source setup

Then I cloned the VIM source to /data/toolkit/source/vim as instructed in the docs.

I then checked out the latest tag (v9.0.1276 at the time of writing) and followed the example of the ExamplePackage to create the Synology Package files.

You can see all the files I added in this commit.

Compile

At this point, my environment was all setup and ready to compile VIM. From the /data/toolkit/pkgscripts-ng directory, I ran the following convenience method to compile the package:

PACKAGE=vim make package

This took somewhere between 5-10 minutes for me.

This seemed to complete the compilation process, but reported having errored (it took a lot of debugging to even get to a complete compile!).

This is where I could no longer follow the package build instructions, and began looking for workarounds. I ended up finding that the .spk file lived in my build environment's image directory:

/data/toolkit/build_env/{platform_build_dir}/image/packages/{package_name}_debug.spk

I copied this file from the container to my local machine and tried uploading it to the DSM package center UI. That didn't work ☹️ Got an error reporting the file was in an invalid format.

Next, I found that the software was indeed successfully compiled to my build environments tmp directory:

This is where it gets really dirty, but hey.. it worked. Essentially, I copied everything from the usr/local directory to my Synology nas.

/data/toolkit/build_env/{platform_build_dir}/tmp/_package_tgz/usr/local/bin/*
/data/toolkit/build_env/{platform_build_dir}/tmp/_package_tgz/usr/local/share/vim

On the NAS side, I copied these to:

/usr/local/bin/
/usr/local/share/

Also had to updates some file permissions so they're accessible for other users:

find /usr/local/share/vim -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /usr/local/share/vim -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

I also updated my path to prefer /usr/local/bin over /usr/bin by updating the PATH variable in /etc/profile
(you can also do this in a local profile file).

Upon trying to run the program, I kept seeing errors of missing shared libraries (.so files).
Each missing library it complained about, I was able to find and copy over from the container's build environment:

/data/toolkit/build_env/{platform_build_dir}/usr/lib/*

All in all, I believe there were 4 or 5 missing libraries..

But after this, I had an updated version of VIM running on my NAS!