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Support for MinGW/Cygwin as an alternative to Visual Studio

See original GitHub issue

node-gyp just needs make and gcc, which are provided by MinGW/Cygwin.

Is MinGW/Cygwin a viable option for node-gyp users instead of the colossal Visual Studio environment?

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 11 years ago
Comments:5 (2 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

3reactions

oktal3700commented, Jun 27, 2013

I’ve been able to build Node in MinGW+MSYS with a few changes. The trick is to use an MSYS build of Python. See http://opensourcepack.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/nodejs-with-posix-path-support.html

0reactions

smaudetcommented, Jun 20, 2017

Quick note on this, with some modification I was able to get node-gyp to generate make files in msys…this involved several steps:

Installing node-gyp inside the mingw-based nodejs (inside of msys)
Patching the globally installed versions of node-gyp/lib/build.js and node-gyp/lib/configure.js in msys to set win = false instead of win = process.platform === ‘win32’
Cleaning up the binding.gyp file in the particular package I was using (node-sass@4.5.3) and a recursed src/libsass.gyp file, to remove references to MSVS_VERSION that were causing a gyp runtime failure.
Issuing a node-gyp configure command.

The above appeared to generate what seem to be appropriate build files in build, however I have not figured out quite how to run them, or if they are complete:

node-gyp build runs
make complains about an issue:

binding.target.mk:87: *** target pattern contains no ‘%’. Stop.

Update:

It appears this is an issue in the windows versions of make. Basically a paths problem. Its probably possible to fix this with cygpath and/or using an older version of make (msys2 comes with gnu make 4.2.1 as of this writing)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/601516/cygwin-make-error-target-pattern-contains-no

Update2:

binding.target.mk had a /C:/ in one of the paths (probably put there in by gyp/node-gyp). That means this tool should probably do some checking for /C:/ and remove the colon -> /c/ Additionally, some relative path to srcdir was created that missed the need to add the /c/ - in msys its /c/Users, not /Users

That’s at least three areas that need patched in node-gyp.

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