Dart Frog on Raspberry Pi

Get started to use VScode with Remote-SSH extension to develop a Dart backend on your local computer.

Prerequisites

You need a 64 bit arm Debian version installed. 32 Bit will not run. Of course you then need a Raspberry Pi which is capable to run a 64 bit OS. I have a Raspi4 with 4 GB and this works fast enough.

Choose a recent version here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-64-bit

If you run the Raspi without screen just as a backend server the Raspberry Pi OS Lite is enough and saves space on the SD card. I recommend to use the Raspberry Pi Imager to copy the downloaded file onto a SD card.

I’m using an OctoPi distribution because my Raspi is also used to control a 3D-Printer. https://unofficialpi.org/Distros/OctoPi/nightly-arm64/2022-08-28_2022-04-04-octopi-bullseye-arm64-lite-1.0.0.zip And I followed this instructions to configure ssh and WiFi: https://octoprint.org/download/

Download the Dart-SDK on the Raspi

My Raspi’s name is octopi. So whenever you see this name in my article use the name of your Raspi. I’m using a MacBook for development. Since VScode runs also on Linux and Windows what I write here should also work in these environments. In your local terminal open a remote ssh session to your Raspberry Pi with this command: ssh pi@octopi

Now you are on the remote machine. Whenever a line starts with a $ you need to enter the line in your remote session (but without the $).

$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/dart-archive/channels/stable/release/2.17.7/sdk/dartsdk-linux-arm64-release.zip

$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ sudo unzip ~/dartsdk-linux-arm64-release.zip

This unpacks a lot of files and will take some time. As a first test whether the downloaded SDK is compatible with your operating system run the dart command and show its version:

$ dart-sdk/bin/dart --version
Dart SDK version: 2.17.7 (stable) (Mon Aug 22 10:43:32 2022 +0200) on "linux_arm64"

If you get an error message here probably no 64 bit arm OS is installed or the downloaded SDK is not for linux but for macOS or Windows. Out of habit I had downloaded the macos…