NodeJS, NPM, Electron

By R. S. Doiel 2017-10-20

Electron is an app platform leveraging web technologies. Conceptually it is a mashup of NodeJS and Chrome browser. Electron site has a nice starter app. It displays a window with Electron version info and ‘hello world’.

Before you can get going with Electron you need to have a working NodeJS and NPM. I usually compile from source and this was my old recipe (adjusted for v8.7.0).

    cd
    git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node.git
    cd node
    git checkout v8.7.0
    ./configure --prefix=$HOME
    make && make install

To install an Electron Quick Start I added the additional steps.

    cd
    git clone https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start
    cd electron-quick-start
    npm install
    npm start

Notice Electron depends on a working node and npm. When I tried this recipe it failed on npm install with errors regarding internal missing node modules.

After some fiddling I confirmed my node/npm install failed because I had install the new version of over a partially installed previous version. This causes the node_modules to be populated with various conflicting versions of internal modules.

Sorting that out allowed me to test the current version of electron-quick-start cloned on 2017-10-20 under NodeJS v8.7.0.

Avoiding Setup Issues in the future

The Makefile for NodeJS includes an ‘uninstall’ option. Revising my NodeJS install recipe above I now do the following to setup a machine to work with NodeJS or Electron.

    git clone git@github.com:nodejs/node.git
    cd node
    ./configure --prefix=$HOME
    make uninstall
    make clean
    make -j 5
    make install

If I am on a device with a multi-core CPU (most of the time) you can speed up the make process using a -j CPU_CORE_COUNT_PLUS_ONE option (e.g. -j 5 for my 4 core x86 laptop).

Once node and npm were working normally the instructions in the electron-quick-start worked flawlessly on my x86.

I have tested the node install recipe change on my Pine64 Pinebook, on several Raspberry Pi 3s as well as my x86 Ubuntu Linux laptop.

I have not gotten Electron up on my Pine64 Pinebook or Raspberry Pi’s yet. npm install outputs errors suggesting that it is expecting an x86 architecture.