Bundling/preinstall woes

Ticket to keep track of edge cases around applications bundling node-pre-gyp (which was the original recommendation but alternatives were proposed in https://github.com/mapbox/node-pre-gyp/issues/162) and not bundling (which was documented as an option in https://github.com/mapbox/node-pre-gyp/pull/201).

• Module uses node-pre-gyp, does bundle node-pre-gyp, and has a direct dependency on a dependency of node-pre-gyp - likely will be de-duped and breaks node v0.10.x install when node-pre-gyp is bundled and the dep is missing: https://github.com/mapbox/node-zipfile/issues/72
• Module uses node-pre-gyp and does not bundle node-pre-gyp: likely will break windows: https://github.com/mapbox/node-sqlite3/issues/720
• Module uses node-pre-gyp and does not bundle node-pre-gyp and uses npm install node-pre-gyp in "preinstall": may lead to unexplainable hangs with various npm versions: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/12583 | https://github.com/mapnik/node-mapnik/pull/658
• Module uses node-pre-gyp and does not bundle node-pre-gyp and uses npm install node-pre-gyp in "preinstall": preinstall fails with enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/user/<package>/package.json' - refs https://github.com/Project-OSRM/node-osrm/issues/305

More details: https://github.com/strongloop/fsevents/issues/157#issuecomment-265545908

[springmeyer]

I always get X is missing a bundled dependency “node-pre-gyp”. Is it ok for modules shipped over GitHub and not npm?

This is expected/normal @pronebird - generally this is okay for modules coming via github, because (if I recall correctly), in this case npm will not dedupe. This lack of deduping avoids one of the problems that requires bundling in the case of an npm install: which is that:

• you might have a project that depends on > 1 module that uses node-pre-gyp
• npm might dedupe node-pre-gyp (when pulling via the npm repository)
• then you might have one of the modules fail to install because node-pre-gyp is not available on PATH when it is needed (due to deduping)

[springmeyer]

Closing this. As long as you are running node > 4:

• You should not need to bundle deps
• You should not need to preinstall node-pre-gyp
• Just list node-pre-gyp in your deps. It should be installed early on in the process such that it can be used to install the binaries for the module it is a dependency of

If anyone finds otherwise, please comment here. But node-sqlite3 has been released recently without any problems without using preinstall or bundledDependencies, so I’m considering this issue resolved.

refs #403