electron/docs/use-native-modules.md

Use native modules

Since atom-shell is using a different V8 version from the official node, you need to build native module against atom-shell's headers to use them.

The apm provided a easy way to do this, after installing it you could use it to install dependencies just like using npm:

$ cd /path/to/atom-shell/project/
$ apm install .

But you should notice that apm install module wont' work because it will install a user package for Atom instead.

Apart from apm, you can also use node-gyp and npm to manually build the native modules.

The node-gyp way

First you need to check which node release atom-shell is carrying via process.version (at the time of writing it is v0.10.5), then you can configure and build native modules via following commands:

$ cd /path-to-module/
$ HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp node-gyp rebuild --target=0.10.5 --arch=ia32 --dist-url=https://gh-contractor-zcbenz.s3.amazonaws.com/atom-shell/dist

The HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp changes where to find development headers. The --target=0.10.5 is specifying node's version. The --dist-url=... specifies where to download the headers.

The npm way

export npm_config_disturl=https://gh-contractor-zcbenz.s3.amazonaws.com/atom-shell/dist
export npm_config_target=0.10.5
export npm_config_arch=ia32
HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp npm install module-name