Raspberry Pi and Akka / Scala

1 minute read

This post is about running Akka on the Raspberry Pi, but because this is so simple to do I will also talk about a simpler development and deployment process.

Clearly from my first post about Scala on the RaspberryPi you can see that the Java JVM on Raspbian is not very fast, so I looked at a process of developing a Scala / Akka application on my Linux desktop and just copy it to the Raspberry Pi as a Jar file and execute there, to remove the tedious wait during the compilation of my source code.

I used the solution sbt-assembly plugin for sbt to achieve this. It was straightforward to create a single JAR (including the scala library and everything) and then copy it over to the Raspberry Pi.

Here is how it goes:

On your desktop (Linux in my case) you should have the [Typesafe Stack] (http://typesafe.com/stack) installed, then go to your project directory and create a new project with this command (see details on the Typesafe website )

$ g8 typesafehub/akka-scala-sbt

# cd into the newly created directory and 
# run with 'sbt run'

Next you need to set up sbt-assembly as described on their website, this involves editing your project/plugins.sbt and ./build.sbt with a few lines.

Then you can run

$ sbt run assembly

to create a big JAR file (about 10 MB) in the target subfolder and copy to your Raspberry Pi with

$ scp HelloAkka-assembly-1.0.jar raspberry:/home/tobias
tobias@raspberry's password:
HelloAkka-assembly-1.0.jar 100% 10MB 5.2MB/s 00:02

then you log in on the Raspberry Pi and just execute it with

$ raspberry$ java -jar HelloAkka-assembly-1.0.jar

Now we have a nice simple process to copy any Scala application to the Raspberry Pi and execute there, only the CPU speed and Memory size are obvious limits.

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