bcrypt 1.0.3 installation fails on Windows 10

[Rhywden]

Meteor version 1.5.1
bcrypt 1.0.3

This is a new issue. Everything worked with 1.0.2 and the Visual Studio build tools. If I try to upgrade bcrypt to 1.0.3, the build process (using meteor npm install) will die a horrible death.

This is an issue with the outdated version of node included with Meteor because I had a similar error when doing npm install because then I got an actually helpful error message: The node version was out of date.

Upon updating Node to a recent version, the build process succeeded again - however, then I naturally got the console warning message that Meteor was using the "native" Javascript bcrypt implementation.

So, currently, Windows users have two options:
a) pin bcrypt to version 1.0.2 or
b) install an up-to-date version of Node, build with that Node version and live with the console message.

[Rhywden]

Oh, and I just tried it out: Node v6 (LTS) will not build either, it has to be v8.

[abernix]

On Windows 10, both bcrypt@1.0.2 and bcrypt@1.0.3 still compile fine for me, both with Meteor 1.5.1 and without Meteor (using Node 4.8.4 and npm 4.6.1, the versions included with Meteor 1.5.1), so something else must be awry here. Could you please include the output from the meteor npm install which results in the "horrible death"? If it's really not helpful, and even more ideal than just running meteor npm install, could you specifically install bcrypt@1.0.3 alone with the --verbose flag, as such:

meteor npm install bcrypt@1.0.3 --verbose

Also, was the "helpful error message" you received actually "The node version was out of date"? I hope you understand the importance of including actual error messages in issues so we more easily help debug problems like this!

And just to emphasize: Node.js 4.8.4 is still under LTS with the Node.js foundation and actively maintained, even if things are moving toward newer versions in Node.js v6 and 8. The bcrypt project has indeed recently released bcrypt@1.0.3, however it doesn't appear that they published pre-built binaries (for use with node-pre-gyp) for Windows platforms, as seen on the releases page. It's possible that your Window's ability to compile from source may not have actually been working properly before and you were just benefiting from the pre-built binaries sourced by node-pre-gyp, the --verbose output from above should shed more light on the problem.

Lastly, bcrypt recently suggested removing support for versions of Node.js prior to version 4, as those versions are no longer LTS, however I haven't seen any talk or commits which would have acted on that yet, and certainly not any that would have stopped support for Node.js v4. Both their package.json's engines field and their TravisCI configuration still suggest they are intending on working with Node.js 4.

[hwillson]

bcrypt installation on Windows 10 is working in our tests, and we haven't heard back regarding the additionally requested info in #9049 (comment), so closing for now. Thanks!