electron-node-pre-gyp-fix

NOTE: I strongly recommend using the node-pre-gyp workaround in electron-rebuild instead, as the monkey-patching this module performs doesn't appear to work with node-inspector.

Overview

node-pre-gyp is used by some NPM packages with native depedencies (e.g. sqlite3, node-inspector) to save end-users the trouble of compiling those native dependencies. However if you wish to use any of these NPM packages in Electron you have to recompile them for your particular version of Electron. Unfortunately node-pre-gyp can't find the native depedencies you've compiled because it looks for them in the wrong place. There are pending PRs (#187 and #177) to address this issue but so far they've received no response from the maintainers. Meanwhile developers using Electron get tripped up by this issue over and over again. This package aims to provide an easy to use (and hopefully robust) workaround until one of the aforementioned PRs finally gets merged in.

Usage

Install the package:

npm install enlight/electron-node-pre-gyp-fix --save

Then install the fix before requiring node-pre-gyp or any modules that require it:

require('electron-node-pre-gyp-fix').install();

The fix must be installed once in every Electron process, and should be done as early as possible during the initializion of a process.

How it works

When the install() function is invoked it monkey-patches Module.prototype._compile() so that when node-pre-gyp/lib/util/versioning.js is compiled the evaluate() function that's exported by that module is monkey-patched to do the right thing when invoked within an Electron process. Note that it doesn't matter how many copies of node-pre-gyp are installed in your node_modules tree, all instances of the evaluate() function will be monkey-patched at runtime provided install() is called before requiring node-pre-gyp.

License

MIT