node-pre-gyp support in the same way than prebuild is supported #367
Description
@MarshallOfSound @malept pinging you folks as you are the most recent contributors, sorry to bother with this, but after looking for a similar solution I found this PR which was not accepted: #170.
node-pre-gyp does allow you to have prebuilt binaries for electron, just like prebuilt. For a working example, see the assets on this release: https://github.com/JCMais/node-libcurl/releases/tag/v2.1.2-1
The trick is that to make it use the correct prebuilt binary some arguments / environment variables must be passed with the npm install / yarn install command, like:
# npm
npm install node-libcurl --runtime=electron --target=v8.2.5 --disturl=https://www.electronjs.org/headers --save
# yarn
npm_config_runtime=electron npm_config_target=v8.2.5 npm_config_disturl=https://www.electronjs.org/headers yarn add node-libcurlIf those flags are not passed the prebuilt binary for the current Node.js version is going to be downloaded, and then later when electron-rebuild is called the addon is built from source, instead of trying to use the prebuilt binary for Electron.
Is the project willing to accept a PR that adds support to it? There is no need to bring the whole node-pre-gyp dependency itself as the linked PR did, as the process should be similar to the one used to support prebuild:
https://github.com/electron/electron-rebuild/blob/c42d6c7ed3ea07b6203a686ccdbfbae6bd5f8b5f/src/rebuild.ts#L295-L336
There are multiple related issues on this repo about node-pre-gyp support, the most recent one is this one:
#309
I should be able to dedicate some time to this PR, but I need to know if there is any possibility of it being accepted.