Feature request: provide pre-compiled binaries (official builds) in npm packages

Currently npm install ffi requires building node-ffi from the source with node-gyp (on Windows the prerequisites are Python and MSVC, the latter is huge).

To get rid of this requirement (and thus to attract more end users and less building-related issues reported), please accomplish the following:

1. Require (and use) node-bindings.
2. Compile binary part of node-ffi for the supported platforms (win32/ia32, darwin/x64, linux/ia32, linux/x64… sunos/ia32?), put the resulting binaries inside your npm package and let node-bindings pick one on user’s side.
3. Put binding.gyp in .npmignore, otherwise npm will still attempt to build from the source. (Do not forget to add some contents of .gitignore to .npmignore when you create the latter, but only some: npm should not ignore the binaries.)
4. (optional) Put binaries in .gitignore to prevent them from being hosted on GitHub. (This step is necessary only if you hate mixing sources with binaries. This step may also be completed already if you build in build/, which is currently in .gitignore.)

After that npm install ffi would involve only downloading and unpacking, and thus would just work.

[TooTallNate]

Thanks for the writeup, but I’m not going to do this. It’s just too much work on the maintainer to have to be constantly recompiling binaries for all platforms whenever the native source code changes. I tried it out for a little while but it’s just unmaintainable.

It’s a pain, but until node has some kind of build farm setup for native modules, then Windows users are just gonna have to install their build chain and compile manually like everyone else.

Don’t fret though, getting some sort of blessed native addon workflow is going to be one of my main goals for node v0.9.

[kroggen]

There is already an appveyor.yml file in this repo. It is just not being used.

And there are recent binary files in this repo: https://github.com/Icenium/node-ffi

So it may not be that hard.