Question

I used the steps explained in this page: http://nodejs.org/api/addons.html and successfully created a addon.node file using the node-gyp tool. it works fine and it’s a wrapper of a c++ static library.

Now I want to distribute this, I created the package.json file using:

npm init

and test it using “npm install . -g” but it tries to recompile the module which will be difficult to achieve because it will require the libraries that I’m embedding into the .node file, is it possible to distribute the .node file that I already compiled in my system?

How can I include the compiled .node file into the npm package and upload it to the npm registry. I’m sure I’m just one step to made it, but I dont know where to start.

I read about the dependencies, but seems that it’s suited when your module depends on other modules, and not with your own .node file.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

ok, I finally did what I wanted to achieve, here’re the options in case someone else needs this:

1. To avoid the compilation you could create a new folder and copy the package.json in there, along with the .node file, I didn’t find this, just tried and it worked.
2. Provide the required libraries to allow the user his own compilation.

Although the first one worked well, I will need to create a package for windows, linux, mac, etc. Which looks very odd to say: “if you are in linux use: npm install xxx-linux”, so I decided to adjust my library to allow the user the module compilation.

To do this I created a “client-dev” installer that has the required libraries precompiled, as long as the include headers required, then created the node module to be compiled using the preinstalled libraries and headers. I will need to add a help in my website to explain that, in order to install the module, the user will need to install the dependencies first using apt-get, windows installer, or mac pkg.

Although this works for me, I don’t know if that will be maintainable in the long run, but I didn’t find a better way to do this. (the only link that finally enlightened my goal was one saying: “if you’re going to use node modules with precompiled libraries you will have nightmares”, anyway… I prefer that instead of doing a full implementation in node js from scratch and maintain version for java, c#, nodejs, php, etc.