Binary executable included in NPM dist installation package

Question

Is it possible to include a binary executable in NPM package? I am struggling to do so on macOS.

I am working on an electron application which uses SVN. Using svn-spawn package I am able to communicate with the svn if it's installed on the machine. However, I would like to not to install SVN and my application separately.

Since SVN works as a single executable - either svn.exe on Windows or svn on macOS, I can edit the following block in node_modules/svn-spawn/lib/svn.js

var Client = function(options) {
    this.option({
        program: '<path_to_svn>/svn.exe'
    }).option(options);
};

After I package it:

works on Windows (even after uninstalling svn - meaning svn became a part of the application)
works on macOS when svn is still in the directory
doesn't work on macOS when svn is deleted

What is the right way of including executables like that in npm installation?

A lot of the gulp packages are shipped with binaries. You can check out [jpegtran-bin](https://github.com/imagemin/jpegtran-bin) for example. If you look at the profiles of the maintainers you'll find more packages that are also shipped with binaries. — Mika Sundland, Jan 20 '18 at 17:08
Is this basically storing binaries on gitHub instead of local file system? — Money_Badger, Jan 20 '18 at 17:43

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 20 '18 at 20:35

For anyone with the same problem - this tread helps: bundling precompiled binary into electron app

You can copy over a file by updating package.json

  "build": {
    "extraFiles": [
      {
        "from": "resources/${os}",
        "to": "Resources/bin",
        "filter": ["**/*"]
      }
    ],

Then referencing this file from your script.

Binary executable included in NPM dist installation package

1 Answers1