electron/docs/tutorial/use-native-node-modules.md
2014-05-07 00:06:35 -05:00

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Use 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.

Native Node module compability

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. Additionally since atom-shell internally uses Node v0.11.9, it carries with the same problem.

To solve this, you should use modules that support both Node v0.10.x and 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

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