Electron ffi rebuild issue: command not found

Question

I am struggling with the error:

Uncaught Exception: Error: A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed."

After some research and debugging, the likely issue is that the node module ffi has not been "rebuilt" for the electron environment. I have tried following the steps at https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/using-native-node-modules.md to rebuild the package, but method 1, when copied to the letter, didn't work.

Method 2 of "Installing module and rebuilding for Electron" doesn't work because entering ./node_modules/.bin/electron-rebuild.cmd (I'm on Windows) doesn't work- Bash simply says "command not found" and I don't see others with this issue. I've tried even running it from PowerShell in case git bash was causing issues, but I get a similar issue, although I also get an error stating:

At line:1 char:1
+electron-rebuild.cmd
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
_CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (electron-rebuild.cmd:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+FullyQualifiedErrorID : CommandNotFoundException

I don't understand method 3 (manually building for Electron) and am hesitant to use it- namely I'm unsure of why there isn't an argument in the manual build command for specifying what package needs to be rebuilt.

I have retried installing Electron Rebuild to the letter per the instructions in https://github.com/electron/electron-rebuild multiple times (npm install --save-dev electron-rebuild) in project folder. It seems to be installed in the correct location.

Why is electron-rebuild not being recognized? What will it take to get ffi installed properly?

I'd also appreciate if someone could point me to some additional places to educate myself on what I might be missing with my conceptualization of this issue. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Ok, this works for me:

1. Ensure Python 2.7.X is installed.
2. Get and Install Visual Studio Build Tools (eg. http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools )
3. To use the correct msvs version during rebuild enter this in eg. a powershell: npm config set msvs_version 2015 --global
4. In my minimal example I used the following package.json:

{
  "name": "stack_ffi",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "start": "electron .",
    "rebuild": "electron-rebuild -f -w ffi"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "XXX",
  "devDependencies": {
    "electron": "2.0.2",
    "electron-rebuild": "1.7.3"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "ffi": "2.2.0",
    "ref": "1.3.5"
  }
}

• Run npm run install and then npm run rebuild

Notes:

• On my first try electron did not install correctly so I have deleted the ./node_modules/electron folder and ran npm run install again.

• When I tried to use a sqlite3.dll on Windows the online example (https://github.com/node-ffi/node-ffi/blob/master/example/sqlite.js) did not work. I had to remove the leading "lib" part from the library string: var SQLite3 = ffi.Library('sqlite3', {...}); //was 'libsqlite3'.

• I tested it on node 7.4.0 and 8.0.0. If it fails on your node version I have the theory that v8::Object::ForceSet was dropped on later versions.

• I had to ensure that Windows can find my dll's. For example I included the sqlite3 x64 dlls by adding their folder location to the PATH env variable.