Support for MinGW/Cygwin as an alternative to Visual Studio

[mcandre]

node-gyp just needs make and gcc, which are provided by MinGW/Cygwin.

Is MinGW/Cygwin a viable option for node-gyp users instead of the colossal Visual Studio environment?

[TooTallNate]

I don't believe either MinGW nor Cygwin are supported by gyp at this time. You'll have to take this one up with the gyp guys directly: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/gyp-developer
I'm afraid there's not much I can do about it.

[mcandre]

The gyp team reports that gyp itself is compiler agnostic. node-gyp should be able to use MinGW/Cygwin just fine instead of Visual Studio.

[TooTallNate]

Well that's good to hear that it should be possible to use the make
target of gyp and it could possible work. I don't really have the time to
try this out any time soon, but if you do let me know and/or send me that
patches required to make it work.

At the moment, I'm pretty sure node-gyp makes a lot of assumptions that the
build system on windows will be MSVS, so I would not be surprised if it
took some elbow grease to get it working with the make target. I'm curious
what happens though!

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Andrew Pennebaker <notifications@github.com

wrote:

The gyp team reports that gyp itself is compiler agnostic. node-gyp should
be able to use MinGW/Cygwin just fine instead of Visual Studio.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/194#issuecomment-13461311.

[oktal3700]

I've been able to build Node in MinGW+MSYS with a few changes. The trick is to use an MSYS build of Python. See http://opensourcepack.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/nodejs-with-posix-path-support.html

[smaudet]

Quick note on this, with some modification I was able to get node-gyp to generate make files in msys...this involved several steps:

1. Installing node-gyp inside the mingw-based nodejs (inside of msys)
2. Patching the globally installed versions of node-gyp/lib/build.js and node-gyp/lib/configure.js in msys to set win = false instead of win = process.platform === 'win32'
3. Cleaning up the binding.gyp file in the particular package I was using (node-sass@4.5.3) and a recursed src/libsass.gyp file, to remove references to MSVS_VERSION that were causing a gyp runtime failure.
4. Issuing a node-gyp configure command.

The above appeared to generate what seem to be appropriate build files in build, however I have not figured out quite how to run them, or if they are complete:

1. node-gyp build runs
2. make complains about an issue:

binding.target.mk:87: *** target pattern contains no '%'. Stop.

Update:

It appears this is an issue in the windows versions of make. Basically a paths problem. Its probably possible to fix this with cygpath and/or using an older version of make (msys2 comes with gnu make 4.2.1 as of this writing)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/601516/cygwin-make-error-target-pattern-contains-no

Update2:

binding.target.mk had a /C:/ in one of the paths (probably put there in by gyp/node-gyp). That means this tool should probably do some checking for /C:/ and remove the colon -> /c/
Additionally, some relative path to srcdir was created that missed the need to add the /c/ - in msys its /c/Users, not /Users

That's at least three areas that need patched in node-gyp.