Electron-rebuild vs npm rebuild?

I’m running into some issues trying to install gRPC@1.11.3. grpc-node team recommends against electron-rebuild: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/issues/250

Here’s the specific issue I’m facing: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/issues/412#issuecomment-399519651

I’m wondering what the right way to resolve these is. Do I want to electron-rebuild everything except gRPC and use npm rebuild --target=electron --target_runtime=2.0.2 --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/electron for only gRPC, or do I want to abandon electron-rebuild altogether?

Is there some additional benefit electron-rebuild brings to the table?

@amilajack, since I know you’re the one who’s going to respond to this, let me end this by thanking you in advance.

[nicolasnoble]

Several things to note here:

• The main advantage of electron-rebuild is to avoid having to specify the runtime version number, so you only have one location to update the electron runtime version instead of two.
• The main downside of native extensions is that there are few of them that understand how to ship things for electron - but grpc does. So using electron-rebuild with grpc brings more pain than it’s worth, mainly because we took great care of ensuring our code works with electron, and that we ship electron pre-built binaries.

If grpc is the only extension you have that’s native, please do not use electron-rebuild at all.

We will alter our documentation to be more specific about all this.

[murgatroid99]

One issue with just letting it fall back to building from source, at least historically, is that Electron version numbers can match io.js version numbers, and if the binary download is not parameterized on the runtime, it can end up incorrectly downloading io.js binaries instead and thinking that the installation is successful. I think this is the reason that the Electron documentation says to always build from source.