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.

You will also need to change require('canvas') to require('canvas-prebuilt').

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

Linux technicalities

Linux users will need glibc >= 2.13.1 (Ubuntu 14.04+, Debian 7+, etc)

If you are using fonts, you might see some FontConfig warnings which are harmless:

Situation	Message	Meaning
You have an old version of FontConfig on your system	Fontconfig warning: line 142: blank doesn't take any effect anymore. please remove it from your fonts.conf	You don't need to do anything, but removing said line or upgrading FontConfig on your system should fix it
You don't have FontConfig	Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file	You don't have any fonts on your system, so if you want to use the text APIs you'll either need to install FontConfig or use Canvas.registerFont

Releases

More detail on the releases below, this won't be relevant to most users.

Binaries

Make sure your node version is the most recent to guarantee ABI compatibility

canvas@1.4.x canvas@1.5.x canvas@1.6.x canvas@2.0.0-alpha.1 canvas@2.0.0-alpha.2	node 8	node 7	node 6	node 5	node 4	node 0.12	node 0.10
Linux x64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Windows x64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
OSX x64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Windows x86	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹
Linux x86	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹
Linux ARM	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹	𐄂¹

¹I have some ideas on how to get these working with cross-compilation if people request it. I plan to add Linux/ARM

Bundling

The bundling scripts just take a regularly compiled executable (canvas.node in this case) and look at which non-system libraries it links against. Those libraries are then copied to the release directory and binaries are updated if necessary to refer to them.

The strategies for bundling could be applied to other projects too since they're general:

• On macOS, macpack is used to search dependencies, filter out non-system ones, and update binary references
• On Windows, Dependency Walker's CLI is used to search dependencies. Anything in the MSYS2 folder is considered non-system. Patching is not necessary because Windows looks for dlls in the same folder as the binary
• On Linux, pax-utils searches dependencies, and everything not in /lib is non-system. The custom binding.gyp compiles canvas.node to look inside its own directory for dependencies