Overriding "host" to point to alternative binary repository

[springmeyer]

Logging this idea. Not positive its a good idea and I may not move on it, but...

Say you want to support much older linux distros with custom binaries. As a developer of an app that depends on node-pre-gyp packaged modules you might want to keep 99% of what node-pre-gyp provides but just request that binaries be fetched from an alternative endpoint that you maintain. If we were to support this then an npm config style override might be possible:

npm config set node-pre-gyp_mapnik_host https://node-mapnik-alternative.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com

Then instead of https://node-mapnik.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com being used from https://github.com/mapnik/node-mapnik/blob/c36d90b237e76e013bcd2c2e15d11ad304658a9a/package.json#L13, the alternative host would be used:

npm install mapnik
node-pre-gyp http GET https://node-mapnik-alternative.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.2/mapnik-v1.4.2-node-v11-darwin-x64.tar.gz

[springmeyer]

proof of concept in 21b6559 shows that npm config options magically show up in the process.env for npm (as long as node-pre-gyp is called by npm and not directly)

[mojodna]

Maybe just node-pre-gyp_host (i.e. no mapnik, to match the options in package.json)?

Being able to override remote_path and package_name would make sense if host is to be included.

[springmeyer]

I meant to do something like npm_config_node_pre_gyp+{module_name}+_host in the code rather than hardcoding mapnik.

I can't see how node-pre-gyp_host would work very well because it would override the host for all modules packaged with node-pre-gyp so for a case like TM2 which also depends on carmen-cache and sqlite3 then you'd break those binary installations unless you also hosted binaries for them.

[mojodna]

Excellent point.

[springmeyer]

@mojodna - still seeing this as useful?

[mojodna]

In theory maybe (custom builds), but it's not something I need at this point.

[springmeyer]

Thanks! I see this as potentially useful in theory too. Let's re-open when its needed/useful in practice.

[fmarmar]

This should be a must. This morning our entire ci system was down because we couldn't download or build a binary needed by a transitive dependency.

[springmeyer]

@fmarmar I think this may be supported after #459

However the breakage this morning impacted everyone using node-tar, so not just node-pre-gyp. And an alliterative repository would not have helped since the breakage was do to the inability to unpack the tar: #477 (comment)