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 versions of Node.js & Electron on a specific platform. By default it downloads prebuilt binaries from a GitHub release.

Note

Instead of prebuild paired with prebuild-install, we recommend prebuildify paired with node-gyp-build.

With prebuildify, all prebuilt binaries are shipped inside the package that is published to npm, which means there's no need for a separate download step like you find in prebuild. The irony of this approach is that it is faster to download all prebuilt binaries for every platform when they are bundled than it is to download a single prebuilt binary as an install script.

Upsides:

1. No extra download step, making it more reliable and faster to install.
2. Supports changing runtime versions locally and using the same install between Node.js and Electron. Reinstalling or rebuilding is not necessary, as all prebuilt binaries are in the npm tarball and the correct one is simply picked on runtime.
3. The node-gyp-build runtime dependency is dependency-free and will remain so out of principle, because introducing dependencies would negate the shorter install time.
4. Prebuilt binaries work even if npm install scripts are disabled.
5. The npm package checksum covers prebuilt binaries too.

Downsides:

1. The installed npm package is larger on disk. Using Node-API alleviates this because Node-API binaries are runtime-agnostic and forward-compatible.
2. Publishing is mildly more complicated, because npm publish must be done after compiling and fetching prebuilt binaries (typically in CI).

Usage

Use prebuild to create and upload prebuilt binaries. Then change your package.json install script to:

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

When a consumer then installs your package with npm thus triggering the above install script, prebuild-install will download a suitable prebuilt binary, or exit with a non-zero exit code if there is none, which triggers node-gyp rebuild in order to build from source.

Options (see below) can be passed to prebuild-install like so:

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

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)
  --arch            arch        (target CPU architecture, see Node OS module docs, default is current arch)
  --platform        platform    (target platform, see Node OS module docs, default is current platform)
  --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, --download, --target, --runtime, --arch --platform and --libc may be passed through via arguments given to the npm command.

Alternatively you can set environment variables npm_config_build_from_source=true, npm_config_platform, npm_config_arch, npm_config_target npm_config_runtime and npm_config_libc.

Libc

On non-glibc Linux platforms, the Libc name is appended to platform name. For example, musl-based environments are called linuxmusl. If --libc=glibc is passed as option, glibc is discarded and platform is called as just linux. This can be used for example to build cross-platform packages on Alpine Linux.

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

Local prebuilds

If you want to use prebuilds from your local filesystem, you can use the % your package name %_local_prebuilds .npmrc variable to set a path to the folder containing prebuilds. For example:

leveldown_local_prebuilds=/path/to/prebuilds

This option will look directly in that folder for bundles created with prebuild, for example:

/path/to/prebuilds/leveldown-v1.2.3-node-v57-win32-x64.tar.gz

Non-absolute paths resolve relative to the directory of the package invoking prebuild-install, e.g. for nested dependencies.

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

Install

With npm do:

npm install prebuild-install

License

MIT

Changelog

[7.1.2] - 2024-02-29

Changed

• Support environments where MD5 is prohibited (#191) (9140468) (Tomasz Szuba)