Using native Node modules

The native Node modules are supported by atom-shell, but since atom-shell is using a different V8 version from official Node, you need to use apm instead of npm to install Node modules.

The usage of apm is quite similar to npm, to install dependencies from package.json of current project, just do:

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

But you should notice that apm install module won't work because it will install a user package for Atom Editor instead.

Which version of apm to use

Generally using the latest release of apm for latest atom-shell always works, but if you are uncertain of the which version of apm to use, you may manually instruct apm to use headers of a specified version of atom-shell by setting the ATOM_NODE_VERSION environment.

For example force installing modules for atom-shell v0.16.0:

$ export ATOM_NODE_VERSION=0.16.0
$ apm install .

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 atom-shell 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.

Other ways of installing native modules

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

The node-gyp way

To build Node modules with headers of atom-shell, you need to tell node-gyp where to download headers and which version to use:

$ cd /path-to-module/
$ HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp node-gyp rebuild --target=0.16.0 --arch=ia32 --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell

The HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp changes where to find development headers. The --target=0.16.0 is version of atom-shell. The --dist-url=... specifies where to download the headers. The --arch=ia32 says the module is built for 32bit system.

The npm way

export npm_config_disturl=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell
export npm_config_target=0.6.0
export npm_config_arch=ia32
HOME=~/.atom-shell-gyp npm install module-name

2.4 KiB Raw Blame History