node-gyp platform specific addon

Question

Is it possible to specify that a certain native addon is only meant to be build for a certain platform (eg: win32 )?

Currently I have a C++ addon that makes use of the Windows API, but node-gyp attempts to build that for UNIX based systems as well.

I've been searching in node-gyp documentation and NodeJS C/C++ addon documentation section without any luck.

Answer 1

Yes.

You can add an "os" section to your package.json to restrict which platforms your addon is compatible with.

Here is the OS package.json documentation.

Answer 2

You can define your own installation script that checks the platform and conditionally builds the binary based on platform.

For example, js-bson includes a custom script the attempt to build and fail silently. You could instead include a script in there that checks the OS, and only runs node-gyp rebuild if the system is windows.