using-native-node-modules.md

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 Easy Way

The most straightforward way to rebuild native modules is via the electron-rebuild package, which handles the manual steps of downloading headers and building native modules:

npm install --save-dev electron-rebuild

# Every time you run npm install, run this too
./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild

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=0.25.0 --arch=ia64 --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell

The HOME=~/.electron-gyp changes where to find development headers. The --target=0.25.0 is version of Electron. The --dist-url=... specifies where to download the headers. The --arch=ia64 says the module is built for 64bit 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=0.25.0
export npm_config_arch=x64
HOME=~/.electron-gyp npm install module-name