How to fail completely via flags if the remote isn't available

[prebuild]

How to fail completely via flags if the remote isn't available

[mathiask88]

@ralphtheninja I meant this behavior.

[mathiask88]

No, this is currently not possible. The standalone check was implemented as a little help for the module developers, so they don't have to specify --build-from-source every time they want to build their modules.

@ralphtheninja I see two options here:

1. remove the standalone path (major)
2. add a new argument for this case like --force-download that skips the standalone check (minor).

I am tending to 1 because prebuild-install was made to download the binary. And it should only exit if a user don't want to or a download is not possible. And for developer there are still two aliases for --build-from-source --compile and -c wich should be documented :)

[ralphtheninja]

I need to convince prebuild-install to not download and not error, or convince node-gyp to not build if it gets run.

I was a bit confused by this. If I understand correctly, you want prebuild-install to download and if that fails it should fail?

How about adding prebuild-install --test instead, you could then have a pretest script that's being run when testing (or add another script and execute it explicitly in e.g. .travis.yml)

@mathiask88 What do you mean with "the standalone path"?

[reconbot]

I think the --test flag would need to process.exit(0) to prevent the binary from being built from node-gyp with the recommended setup.

Unless --test would be used for testing to see if it could download the package and not actually installing the binary?

I'd prefer to keep this in the install processes so I can verify that not only it downloaded but the download works.

eg

npm install --prebuild-test
node ./ # Would fail if binary isn't present 

Funny enough this works on linux, false takes any argument and fails

node-gyp rebuild --make=false

but I don't know how to pass it through npm install

[mathiask88]

Oh, ok I misread. I thought you want to download the binary in your dev environment, ignore my last answer then :)

[ralphtheninja]

Oh, ok I misread. I thought you want to download the binary in your dev environment, ignore my last answer then :)

This is my current understanding as well :)

[mathiask88]

@reconbot Is this still a thing?

[reconbot]

Yeah, unless there's been new features I don't know about. This allows me to test our build pipeline and ensure we have binaries published and useable without having to build something to test prebuild-install.