canvas-prebuilt

This is a drop-in replacement for canvas that does not require any compiling. To use it just npm install canvas-prebuilt or replace canvas with canvas-prebuilt in your dependencies.

The repo is just a set of scripts that downloads a specific node-canvas version, builds it and bundles it on all platforms. It's meant to run on Travis and AppVeyor but it can be run locally too

Bundling

The bundling scripts just take a regularly compiled executable (canvas.node in this case) and look at which shared libraries it links against. Those libraries are then copied to the release directory. Windows will look for DLLs in the same directory by default, OSX hard-codes the path to the dylib in executables so you have to recursively update references after the copy, and in Linux you simply have to compile canvas.node in such a way that it will look in the current directory first (using the rpath linker option).