# Building the Latest Sonic Pi on Raspberry Pi

Hello there lovely Raspberry Pi user - welcome to our build instructions.


### TLDR

If you're already familiar with the terminal and running shell scripts,
etc., you can fetch, build and start Sonic Pi with the following:

```
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi.git
cd sonic-pi/app
./pi-setup.sh
./pi-build-all.sh
./build/gui/sonic-pi

```

Note this requires at least the 64bit version of RaspberryPi Bookworm OS - released on October 10th 2023. The built application will run on P3, Pi4, P400 or Pi5 models.

### Installing vs Building

These instructions are for people wanting to build/compile their own
version of Sonic Pi. If you're just looking to install and run it you
can download our latest binary deb from the Sonic Pi website here:
https://sonic-pi.net/#rp

However, if you want to use the absolute latest development version or
get involved with modifying and changing the source code, you'll need to
build things yourself and hopefully this document will help you do just
that.

OK, so just to get you prepared, we're going to do a few things:

1. Clone Sonic Pi's source code using git.
2. Fetch all the development dependencies
3. Initiate the build by using a shell script.
4. Start your new Sonic Pi app.

All of these steps will require the terminal which can be found by
clicking on the Raspberry Pi logo and then Accessories -> Terminal.


### Notes

* If you have any issues building Sonic Pi on Raspberry Pi OS please
  open up an issue on GitHub and we'll try our best to assist you:
  https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/issues
* These build instructions assume you're running the latest 64bit version
  of Raspberry Pi OS based on Bookwork released in October 2023. You may therefore need to update your distribution before continuing.


## 1. Get the Sonic Pi Source Code

The first thing we need to do is to grab a copy of Sonic Pi's source code.

The easiest way of getting this is to clone from GitHub
into a local folder such as `~/Development/sonic-pi`:

```
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi.git ~/Development/sonic-pi
```

(The `--recurse-submodules` flag fetches the SuperSonic audio engine at
`app/external/supersonic`. If you forget it, the prebuild step will
run `git submodule update --init --recursive` for you on first run.)

By default this will check out the `dev` branch which contains all the
most recent development work. If you'd like the latest stable release
you'll need to checkout the `stable` branch with `cd
~/Development/sonic-pi && git checkout stable`

From now on these instructions will assume you're in the `sonic-pi`
directory. For example, if you cloned into `~/Development/sonic-pi` you
can change into this directory with:

```
cd ~/Development/sonic-pi
```

## 2. Fetch the Development Dependencies

Now we're ready to fetch all the development dependencies.

```
./app/pi-setup.sh
```

## 3. Running the Build
To start the build process run the following command (which will likely take some time - approx 1hr on a Pi400):

```
./app/pi-build-all.sh
```

## 4. Start Sonic Pi

Finally, you can run your newly compiled Sonic Pi app with the following command:

```
./app/build/gui/sonic-pi
```


Good luck and please share your new live coding adventure with us over on:

https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net