@coder/nbin

nbin ·

Fast and robust node.js binary compiler.

WARNING: This project was created for code-server and may provide limited support.

Why was this made? Why not use pkg or nexe?

• Support for native node modules.
• No magic. The user specifies all customization. An example of this is overriding the file system.
• First-class support for multiple platforms.

Usage

nbin does not do any kind of scanning for requiring files; it only includes the files you tell it to. That means you should include everything (for example by using writeFiles('/path/to/repo/*')) or use a bundler like Webpack and include the bundle.

When running within the binary, your application will have access to a module named nbin.

Two packages are provided:

• @coder/nbin - available as an API to build binaries.
• nbin - ONLY available within your binary.

Example

import { Binary } from "@coder/nbin";

const bin = new Binary({
  mainFile: "out/cli.js",
});

bin.writeFile("out/cli.js", Buffer.from("console.log('hi');"));
const output = bin.bundle();

Forks

To use the compiled binary as the original Node binary set the NBIN_BYPASS environment variable. This can be especially useful when forking processes (or spawning with the binary). You might want to simply immediately set this to any truthy value as soon as your code loads.

Webpack

If you are using webpack to bundle your main, you'll need to externalize modules.

// webpack.config.js

module.exports = {
  ...
  external: {
    nbin: "commonjs nbin",
    // Additional modules to exclude
  },
};

Environment

You can pass NODE_OPTIONS.

NODE_OPTIONS="--inspect-brk" ./path/to/bin

Gzip'd JavaScript files are supported to reduce bundle size.

Development

yarn
yarn build

When publishing use npm and not yarn as yarn will traverse ignored directories anyway and re-add anything excluded by any discovered .gitignore files.

Patching

We patch Node to make it capable of reading files within the binary.

To generate a new patch, stage all the changes you want to be included in the patch in the Node source, then run yarn patch:generate in this directory.