This Github Action is an opinionated node addon builder that is designed to be used in conjunction with the install-addons module.

This system is designed to make building and consuming prebuilt node addons as easy as possible. It differs from other similar solutions such as node-pre-gyp and prebuild/prebuildify in that:

• Github Actions is used to do all of the pre-compilation. This is probably the biggest difference since the other solutions require you to manually set up the appropriate build environment and then upload the binary somewhere.

• All output is stored in a Github Release. This means you don't need S3 or a separate file hosting provider.

• For addons that have files only used for building that take up a large amount of space, you have the option of (manually) omitting such files when publishing to npm and instead having them downloaded on the fly only when needed (e.g. falling back to a build). This saves on the size of your published npm package.

• node.js
  • Versions: v10.x and newer
  • Platforms
    • Windows
      • MSVC libc - x64 (amd64)
    • macOS
      • bsd/built-in libc - x64 (amd64)
    • Linux
      • kernel 3.10 - glibc 2.17 - x64 (amd64)
      • kernel 3.10 - glibc 2.17 - arm64 (armv8-a)
      • kernel 3.10 - glibc 2.17 - arm7 (armv7-a)
      • kernel 3.10 - musl 1.1.16 - x64 (amd64)

There is currently no support for nwjs.

1. Set up your Github Actions workflow

   a. Add a job that creates the release

   • Recommended: Create the release in draft mode to indicate "in progress" state

   b. Add a job that defines your build matrix. Example:

   matrix:
     job:
       - { node: 16.x, os: ubuntu-latest,  arch: x64,   libc: glibc, libcver: "2.17", kernel: "3.10" }
       - { node: 16.x, os: ubuntu-latest,  arch: arm64, libc: glibc, libcver: "2.17", kernel: "3.10" }
       - { node: 16.x, os: macos-latest,   arch: x64,   macos: "10.11" }
       - { node: 16.x, os: "windows-2019", arch: x64,   msvs: "2019", vc: "14.2", winos: "7.0", winosflag: "0x0601" }

   • Common job properties
     • node - The node version to compile against
     • electron - The electron version to compile against
       • When this is specified, node merely becomes the node version used for running scripts during the build process
       • Note: You will need to make sure that the libc and other values that are dependent upon how electron was built (for the selected platform) are set appropriately
     • os - The name of a valid Github Runner
     • arch - The architecture to compile for
   • Linux-specific properties
     • libc - The name of a supported libc to compile against
     • libcver - The version of a supported libc to compile against
     • kernel - The version of a supported kernel to compile against
   • macOS-specific properties
     • macos - The version of the macOS to compile for
   • Windows-specific properties
     • msvs - The year-based Visual Studio version to use when compiling
     • vc - The version of Visual C++ to use
     • winos - The minimum supported Windows OS version
     • winosflag - The minimum supported Windows OS version as would be set for _WIN32_WINNT. The values of both winos and winosflag must agree. Note: currently node-gyp does not support setting compiler defines outside of .gyp/.gypi files, so you will need to manually set _WIN32_WINNT to the value of winosflag.

   c. Add this Github Action to the steps of that same job. Example:

   steps:
   - name: Generate Binaries
     uses: mscdex/buildbinaries@...
     with:
       releaseID: ...
       buildOnlyPaths: ...
       binaryType: ...
       token: ...

   Where releaseID is set to the ID of the release you just created.

   • buildOnlyPaths is an optional comma-delimited string list of paths to use to create an archive of files used solely for building. This archive will be downloaded on demand by install-addons when it needs to fallback to building.

   • binaryType is an optional string containing the mime type of the format that the indvidual binaries will be stored in. The supported values are currently: "application/gzip" or "application/octet-stream". Normally this shouldn't need to be changed unless the default compressed output results in file sizes larger than the original binary. Default: "application/gzip"

   • token is an optional string containing the Github token to use when accessing the Github API. Default: github.token

   d. (Recommended) Add a job to change your draft release to a published release

   e. (Recommended) Add a job that removes the (draft) release when a failure occurs

2. Set up your package.json. See the install-addons documentation for this.

3. Assuming your package.json is configured correctly, just trigger your workflow to generate your binaries and proceed to install your addon via npm.