Bundle project with sqlite3 dependency that uses prebuilt binaries

[gnoluna]

Hi there,

I encountered an issue when trying to bundle sqlite3 dependencies. The prebuilt binary is located at node_modules/sqlite3/lib/binding/napi-v6-darwin-unknown-x64/node_sqlite3.node.

In the runtime, the binary is loaded by

const binding_path = binary.find(path.resolve(path.join(__dirname,'../package.json')));

which fails in the bundled output js because the __dirname is not referring to the module dir anymore.

the package.json in the sqlite3 module has specified the binary module

"binary": {
    "module_name": "node_sqlite3",
    "module_path": "./lib/binding/napi-v{napi_build_version}-{platform}-{libc}-{arch}",
    "host": "https://github.com/TryGhost/node-sqlite3/releases/download/",
    "remote_path": "v{version}",
    "package_name": "napi-v{napi_build_version}-{platform}-{libc}-{arch}.tar.gz",
    "napi_versions": [
      3,
      6
    ]
  },

What's the recommended way to bundle with prebuilt binaries like sqlite3?

[evanw]

This is in the “getting started” instructions for node (https://esbuild.github.io/getting-started/#bundling-for-node, copied below):

You also may not want to bundle your dependencies with esbuild. There are many node-specific features that esbuild doesn't support while bundling such as __dirname, import.meta.url, fs.readFileSync, and *.node native binary modules. You can exclude all of your dependencies from the bundle by setting packages to external:

esbuild app.jsx --bundle --platform=node --packages=external

If you do this, your dependencies must still be present on the file system at run-time since they are no longer included in the bundle.

You can also mark individual packages as external if you want to do this on a case-by-case basis.

[gnoluna]

Hello @evanw Thanks for your reply. I meant to ask if it is still possible to bundle those binaries without having them at runtime. Now I know that it is not possible and the only way is to exclude them.