Vaadin Development on Mac M1

Flow
1

I just finished configuring a new Mac M1 and wanted to share my experiences for anybody who might be considering it for Vaadin development.

Setup:

  • Vaadin 14.4.6
  • Spring Boot 2.2.6
  • Adopt OpenJDK 11 / Azul OpenJDK 11.0.10
  • MySQL 8.0.23
  • MySQL Workbench 8.0.22
  • Maven 3.6.3
  • Eclipse 2021-03 (4.19.0)
  • Homebrew 3.0.4
  • Node 15.11.0

Pretty much all of the tools are x86 versions except for Azul OpenJDK which is M1 optimized.

Installation was pretty smooth. The only issue I ran into was Vaadin installing an older version of node under ~/.vaadin even though I have Node 15 installed globally. I got around it by deleting the two node folders under ~/.vaadin.

Application Start time (as reported by Spring boot)

  • 2016 Macbook Pro 2.0 GHz Dual Core i5 16 GB Ram Catalina: 24.96 seconds
  • 2019 Macbook Pro 2.8 GHz 8-Core i9 32 GB Ram Catalina: 16.50 seconds
  • 2020 Macbook Air M1 16 GB Ram BigSur AdoptOpenJDK: 17.37 Seconds
  • 2020 Macbook Air M1 16 GB Ram BigSur AzulOpenJDK: 10.15 seconds

I have not been able to get the Vaadin designer to work on either, On Catalina the “Open in Vaadin designer” button doesn’t do anything at all. On the M1, it says that Node has to be installed and available in the system path. I tried adding node to the path, but that did not fix it.

2

Hi, thanks for sharing this.

You mention installation was smooth, and this is of course really good to hear! I was interested in what instructions did you follow? Especially for system-wide installation for tools like Maven and Node? Did you solve the problems with paths?

3

Hi Sami,

I installed Maven and Node using Homebrew.

I was not able to solve the issue with the Designer. It’s broken on both Catalina and BigSur for me and it has been broken for quite some time. There are a couple of tickets open in Github as well.

https://github.com/vaadin/designer/issues/2377

https://github.com/vaadin/designer/issues/2359

4

Hi,

I think those are not M1 related issues. Just some hurdles with Designer startup. I have been using M1 macbook pro just fine in IntelliJ. Node just needs to be installed with the default way to make it work.

I asked my colleague to look into this, maybe Designer could also use the automatic Node installation what we already do in normal build. They are busy now with finishing one feature regarding the renewed theme mechanism, but maybe after that, let’s see!

cheers,
matti