Node ABI issue with 9.0.2 bindings

[choppsta]

Summary of Problem

• What are you trying to do?

Install serialport with prebuilt bindings

• What happens?

They cannot be found

• What should have happened?

They should be matched against the node ABI number and downloaded

Versions, Operating System and Hardware

• [email protected]
• Node.js 12+
• Windows, Linux, Mac

It looks like the process that builds the prebuilt bindings is affected by this issue:
electron/node-abi#90

The filenames of the bindings don't seem to have the right ABI numbers (e.g. node 12 should be 72, but I believe it's incorrectly being labelled as 68).

It would also be really great to get prebuilt bindings for electron 10 (ABI 82)!

[reconbot]

Until that issue closes there's not much we can do.

[Lovinity]

It looks like node-abi released an update a few days ago.

[jeffrson]

Also there are'nt binary files for node 14 (LTS!) ABI 83.

[reconbot]

Try [email protected]

[reconbot]

And as always I welcome help maintaining the project, I'm not able to attend to these changes promptly.

[choppsta]

Thanks reconbot, unfortunately I think there is still an issue with the bindings build process as the ABI numbers for the node bindings don't seem to match (https://github.com/lgeiger/node-abi/blob/master/abi_registry.json). The electron ones are ok, although they only go up to 80 (Electron 9) where as the current version of Electron is two major versions ahead now. A lot of the recent issues on this repo seem to be related to this.

I really appreciate all the work you put into this project and would love to help out if I can. Could you point me in the right direction for how the building of these bindings works?

[choppsta]

Hi reconbot, I've dug into this and found the source of the issue:

The version of the node-abi in the package-lock.json is out of date. It's version 2.19.1 when the current version is 2.19.3. Because it's a dependency of prebuild it won't get updated unless that project specifies a higher version.

Quick solution is npm update --depth 2 node-abi, although it might be better to add node-abi as a dependency to this project meaning that it could be kept up to date more easily with npm update.

Hope this helps. Let me know if I can do anything to help further.

[jeffrson]

Good find @choppsta!

Although the "bindings" workspace has an updated package-lock.json, prebuild is installed from the workspace's root and so it uses the node-abi that's available there.

I can confirm, that with @choppsta's "quick fix" correctly versioned packages (ABI) can be built.

[ItsHarper]

@choppsta Ah, that's annoying. I actually added node-abi as an explicit dependency for the bindings package, but I didn't realize it needed to be done at the top-level as well. I'll make another PR.

[reconbot]

Released in 9.0.4, binaries should be available int he next 30-45 minutes

[reconbot]

Looks like we're having build issues on linux and windows. I'm digging into it.

[reconbot]

I've ported the builds to github actions, seems to be in good shape.

[choppsta]

That's great, thanks everyone! I can confirm this now works perfectly, even for the latest electron version (11.1.0).

[Lovinity]

I must be doing something wrong because I'm still getting bindings 9.0.4 which has the Windows/Linux build error that @reconbot mentioned. 9.0.5 seems to be unpublished.

[reconbot]

There is no 9.0.5, I got it working for 9.0.4