Prebuilt binaries

[coderaiser]

Would be great if node-pty use something like prebuild to avoid compiling on every install. Especially on windows. Alot people will appreciate it.

[Tyriar]

While I'm not the biggest fan of including pre-built binaries it really makes sense particularly for winpty which will never change and takes quite a while to compile. I believe that is also the lib that has the dependencies that causes issues.

I'd rather not build and ship a binary for every single version of node though.

[Tyriar]

WIP branch https://github.com/Tyriar/node-pty/tree/46_include_winpty_binaries

[Tyriar]

Remaining work:

• Both ia32 and x64 architectures of winpty need to be supported depending on the requested build type and linked correctly in binding.gyp.
• Get it working in VS Code, last time I checked ./demo/fork_demo.js worked fine but when I tried to include it in VS Code it wasn't working.
• Figure out how to best clean the node-pty module binaries so that only the current arch is included on install. Downloading the relevant binaries might be the best idea, I tried to programmatically extract the zip from https://github.com/rprichard/winpty/releases but all node unzip modules failed to parse the release zip file. This is a requirement of VS Code's build system.

[stevenvachon]

Why not use is-windows to decide whether to run npm install windows-build-tools as a post-install script?

[Tyriar]

The build is already too long imo, the better fix is to remove the build all together as it's not necessary since nothing in the winpty lib is modified.

[stevenvachon]

Can this maybe be pushed to 0.8.0 so that 0.7.0 can be released? My Travis CI builds are failing.

[Tyriar]

@stevenvachon why not run npm install windows-build-tools before installing on Travis?

[Tyriar]

Wait, Travis support Windows now? Do you mean appveyor?

[stevenvachon]

I'm running both Travis and AppVeyor. I'm using v0.6.x of this lib, which does not have #66, so my Travis builds are failing.

[Tyriar]

@stevenvachon for Linux/macOS builds like https://travis-ci.org/stevenvachon/dotenv-prompt/jobs/253712264 you can copy this config which runs install fine: https://github.com/Tyriar/node-pty/blob/master/.travis.yml

Your build is failing because of nan's compiler requirements:

../node_modules/nan/nan.h:43:3: error: #error This version of node/NAN/v8 requires a C++11 compiler

Your windows build should be fixed by installing windows-build-tools