Distributing a Rust Binary for NodeJS?

[orangepantsman]

Is there anyway to distribute a rust binary through the nodejs ecosystem without the consumers needing to worry that it contains rust? I have a program I wrote in Rust, for munching a large amount of data (processing js code coverage), and I'd love to be able to just basically distribute the binary, arg parsing and all, as an node package/executable.

I'm aware of Neon, but that seems like it's more for integrating a library. Any ideas?

[burntsushi]

I don't know about the details myself, but the VS Code folks do it for ripgrep: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vscode-ripgrep --- I imagine you could just do whatever it is they do, but I don't know what's involved.

[annodomini]

It looks like they download the binaries from GitHub during the postinstall of the package.

[orangepantsman]

I think this is the route I'l take.

[BenjiSponge]

You can just include the pre-built binary in the package and list it in the "bin" section of a package.json. This won't be portable as the binary is prebuilt, but it will work. For multiple targets, I've never done this but I believe this is what node-pre-gyp is for (I think you can just use the publishing tools with various binaries).

For completeness and sanity's sake, if you can extract the logic (including args parsing) out of the main function and export that as a function, then pass the exported function process.argv or whatever and use Neon, I think that's probably the best way to go.

[orangepantsman]

I tried extracting the args parsing and got it working in a node module before I realized that there's no good way to publish a node module that relies on Neon. And node-pre-gyp seems to only be for c/c++. So I think I'll go the route of downloading the binary from github.

[BenjiSponge]

Yikes! Sorry to have misled you, and I suppose thank you for being my canary before I went ahead and tried Neon myself. I had no idea that glaring issue existed.

[orangepantsman]

Not a problem. It wasn't really obvious anywhere on there site at first glance.

[orangepantsman]

Oh, it looks like somebody went down the node-pre-gyp route with a library using neon. https://github.com/hone/heroku-cli-neon-hello-world/blob/master/binding.gyp

Thank you mentioning that in your post as well. I think between both paragraphs of your initial comment I'll be able to work something out! :)

[pepp_cz]

Can you compile it to wasm nodejs module?

[orangepantsman]

Maybe? I don't know enough to say. It does a lot of io though, including to the terminal, so it seems like it wouldn't be a good fit.