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Using native Node modules
The native Node modules are supported by Electron, but since Electron is using a different V8 version from official Node, you have to manually specify the location of Electron's headers when building native modules.
Native Node module compatibility
Since Node v0.11.x there were vital changes in the V8 API. So generally all native modules written for Node v0.10.x wouldn't work for Node v0.11.x. And because Electron internally uses Node v0.11.13, it carries with the same problem.
To solve this, you should use modules that support Node v0.11.x, many modules do support both now. For old modules that only support Node v0.10.x, you should use the nan module to port it to v0.11.x.
How to install native modules
The node-gyp way
To build Node modules with headers of Electron, you need to tell node-gyp
where to download headers and which version to use:
$ cd /path-to-module/
$ HOME=~/.electron-gyp node-gyp rebuild --target=0.16.0 --arch=ia32 --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell
The HOME=~/.electron-gyp changes where to find development headers. The
--target=0.16.0 is version of Electron. The --dist-url=... specifies
where to download the headers. The --arch=ia32 says the module is built for
32bit system.
The npm way
You can also use npm to install modules, the steps are exactly the same with
Node modules, except that you need to setup some environment variables:
export npm_config_disturl=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell
export npm_config_target=0.23.0
export npm_config_arch=x64
HOME=~/.electron-gyp npm install module-name