node-binaries

Experiment to publish node CLI tools via npm, but without worrying about supporting a range of node versions. We do this by bundling a copy of the node binary for each platform. Even if a user is running node 10, we bundle node 12, so your CLI tool is free to use node 12 features.

A postinstall script sets up a symlink to the correct node binary. This is on the path as node-binary, not to be confused with node which will still be the host system's node binary.

If you want your own binaries to also use this bundled node binary, we offer a function to generate a bootstrapper.

NOTE does not support Windows. This is theoretically easy to add, but I don't have an immediate need for it.

API

• When loaded as a node module, exposes functions to get node binary path, create symlinks, and create bootstrappers.
• node-binary executable: symlink to the bundled node binary.
• node-binary-path executable: outputs the path to bundled node executable for your platform.

Example

You want to publish a node CLI tool, my-cli, that uses the bundled node binary, avoiding the system node binary.

In your package.json:

  "bin": {
      "my-cli" "./my-cli"
  }

my-cli

#!/usr/bin/env node
require('node-binaries').replaceWithBootstrapperAndInvoke(__filename, './my-cli.js');

my-cli.js is the entry-point for your CLI tool.

The first time a user runs my-cli, it will be replaced with a bootstrapper .sh that contains hardcoded

NOTE: this will fail if the module was installed as root and then invoked as a regular user. If that's the case, you'll need to create the bootstrapper in a postinstall script.