prebuild-install

What is prebuild-install?

The prebuild-install npm package is used to install prebuilt binaries for Node.js modules, if available, before falling back to building from source. This can significantly speed up installation times and avoid the need for a full development environment with build tools like gcc or Visual Studio.

What are prebuild-install's main functionalities?

Installing prebuilt binaries

Automatically downloads and installs prebuilt binaries for a module if they are available for the current platform and Node.js version. If prebuilt binaries are not available, it will fall back to building from source.

npm install --save <module-name>

Custom binary hosting

Allows specifying custom hosting URLs and tag prefixes for prebuilt binaries, enabling the use of private or alternative binary hosting solutions.

npm install --build-from-source --prebuild-tag-prefix="<custom-prefix>-" --prebuild-download="<custom-hosting-url>"

Skipping prebuilt binary download

Forces the installation process to compile the module from source, bypassing the download of prebuilt binaries.

npm install --build-from-source

Other packages similar to prebuild-install

node-pre-gyp

node-pre-gyp is a similar package that facilitates the installation of precompiled binaries for Node.js modules. It differs from prebuild-install in its configuration and build process, but serves a similar purpose of avoiding the need to compile modules from source.

node-gyp

node-gyp is not a direct alternative to prebuild-install but is often used in conjunction with it. node-gyp is a cross-platform command-line tool for compiling Node.js native addon modules from source. It is used when prebuilt binaries are not available or when a build from source is explicitly requested.

prebuild

prebuild is a tool for creating and managing prebuilt binaries for Node.js modules. It is often used in tandem with prebuild-install. While prebuild is focused on the creation of the binaries, prebuild-install is designed for the end-user installation experience.

README

prebuild-install

A command line tool to easily install prebuilt binaries for multiple version of node/iojs on a specific platform.

prebuild-install supports installing prebuilt binaries from GitHub by default.

Usage

Change your package.json install script to:

{
  "scripts": {
    "install": "prebuild-install || node-gyp rebuild"
  }
}

Requirements

You need to provide prebuilds made by prebuild.

Help

prebuild-install [options]

  --download    -d  [url]       (download prebuilds, no url means github)
  --target      -t  version     (version to install for)
  --runtime     -r  runtime     (Node runtime [node, napi or electron] to build or install for, default is node)
  --path        -p  path        (make a prebuild-install here)
  --token       -T  gh-token    (github token for private repos)
  --tag-prefix <prefix>         (github tag prefix, default is "v")
  --build-from-source           (skip prebuild download)
  --verbose                     (log verbosely)
  --libc                        (use provided libc rather than system default)
  --debug                       (set Debug or Release configuration)
  --version                     (print prebuild-install version and exit)

When prebuild-install is run via an npm script, options --build-from-source, --debug and --download, may be passed through via arguments given to the npm command.

Private Repositories

prebuild-install supports downloading prebuilds from private GitHub repositories using the -T <github-token>:

$ prebuild-install -T <github-token>

If you don't want to use the token on cli you can put it in ~/.prebuild-installrc:

token=<github-token>

Alternatively you can specify it in the prebuild-install_token environment variable.

Note that using a GitHub token uses the API to resolve the correct release meaning that you are subject to the (GitHub Rate Limit).

Create GitHub Token

To create a token:

• Go to this page
• Click the Generate new token button
• Give the token a name and click the Generate token button, see below

The default scopes should be fine.

Custom binaries

The end user can override binary download location through environment variables in their .npmrc file. The variable needs to meet the mask % your package name %_binary_host or % your package name %_binary_host_mirror. For example:

leveldown_binary_host=http://overriden-host.com/overriden-path

Note that the package version subpath and file name will still be appended. So if you are installing leveldown@1.2.3 the resulting url will be:

http://overriden-host.com/overriden-path/v1.2.3/leveldown-v1.2.3-node-v57-win32-x64.tar.gz

Cache

All prebuilt binaries are cached to minimize traffic. So first prebuild-install picks binaries from the cache and if no binary could be found, it will be downloaded. Depending on the environment, the cache folder is determined in the following order:

• ${npm_config_cache}/_prebuilds
• ${APP_DATA}/npm-cache/_prebuilds
• ${HOME}/.npm/_prebuilds

License

MIT