Ncc: Shipping externalized native deps

[rgbkrk]

Hey all!

I'm looking to ship a package that's been run through ncc that includes a native dep (zeromq). The current support is great, as I get a nice tidy little collection:

dist$ tree -h
.
├── [  96]  build
│   └── [  96]  Release
│       └── [1.1M]  zmq.node
├── [  11]  index.d.ts
├── [5.1M]  index.js
└── [ 263]  server.d.ts

That zmq.node is specific to the node it's being run on (yes, yes, zeromq is looking to switch to N-API). Luckily, zeromq ships prebuilds for each platform that we can install / have available. We can write a postinstall that will place the zeromq prebuilds in build/Release/zmq.node, that's no problem.

What I'm wondering about is if there could be some way to ease this / create a paved path for working with native deps & ncc.

[guybedford]

This is definitely an interesting area that could be explored further. I wonder if there could be a way to integrate something like prebuild (https://github.com/prebuild/prebuild) with such a workflow.

@TooTallNate would value your thoughts here too.

[guybedford]

I guess if zeromq is already shipping prebuilds the point is that it's just about supporting the prebuilds in the ncc build. That is definitely something we could support here.

[rgbkrk]

Yep, we (zeromq) already ship prebuilds so if there's a nice way for ncc to support prebuilds then I'm happy. 😄