Best practice to support electron-rebuild

Hi, I’m a maintainer of node-serialport and a bunch of my users use electron and electron-rebuild. We hadn’t been supporting it as well as I’d like and with our latest beta we’ve upgraded nan and cleaned up our build processes. This has broth improved electron support as we work with the latest versions and made it more annoying.

According to this issue we can now run electron-rebuild but we must first remove our binary file manually. It currently resides in build/Release/serialport.node It will be there if you’ve built it or downloaded it via pre-gyp during install. That seems annoying. I’m a bit new to the electron ecosystem so I wanted to check with you to see if we could do something to make this easier, or provide better instructions to get it going.

Thanks!

[cheton]

I ran this command from node_modules, and it reported that serialport.node already installed.

$ node electron-rebuild/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js rebuild serialport \
    --runtime=electron \
    --target=0.37.6 \
    --arch=x64 \
    --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/atom-shell

> serialport@3.0.0 install /Users/cheton/github/cnc/node_modules/serialport
> node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build

[serialport] Success: "/Users/cheton/github/cnc/node_modules/serialport/build/Release/serialport.node" already installed
Pass --update-binary to reinstall or --build-from-source to recompile
serialport@3.0.0 /Users/cheton/github/cnc/node_modules/serialport

Passing the --update-binary option works for me, it can overwrite a pre-installed build/Release/serialport.node.

> serialport@3.0.0 install /Users/cheton/github/cnc/node_modules/serialport
> node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build

gyp WARN download NVM_NODEJS_ORG_MIRROR is deprecated and will be removed in node-gyp v4, please use NODEJS_ORG_MIRROR
  CXX(target) Release/obj.target/serialport/src/serialport.o
  CXX(target) Release/obj.target/serialport/src/serialport_unix.o
  CXX(target) Release/obj.target/serialport/src/serialport_poller.o
  SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/serialport.node
serialport@3.0.0 /Users/cheton/github/cnc/node_modules/serialport

I believe you can add the --update-binary option to the rebuildNativeModules function to make it work: https://github.com/electron/electron-rebuild/blob/master/src/main.js#L122

Hope this information will help you!

[anaisbetts]

Can you just remove node-pre-gyp? tbh, that’d be far-and-away the easiest way to solve this problem