Question : How to contribute to repo with prebuilds for Mac M1

[DonJayamanne]

Sorry for not using the right template.
Not sure this is the place to ask this, but I'm trying to find out how we can contribute the prebuilds for Mac m1

[JamesHenry]

I'm here for the same reason. When installing my repo on a new Mac Mini for the first time, the zeromq piece generated a large output and ultimately exited with a make error.

I'm definitely out of my comfort zone when inspecting these types of logs, but It seems the building piece did actually succeed, but the node-gyp command did not.

In my case zeromq is in my dependencies because of a dependency on sawtooth-sdk which brings it in (and sadly that's v4 of zeromq.js although I don't think that was relevant here).

If I can provide any more information that would be valuable (e.g. the logs I am referring to), please let me know.

[aminya]

We managed to build Zadeh, one of my native libraries, for macOS by adding the following flags. But there are no CI services or official Node for Arm64 to prebuild and test it. I requested one of my friends who has M1 to build it locally and send me the arm64 prebuild.

https://github.com/atom-community/zadeh/blob/0a5ca9a129fdfd947fa4c697dfdbbdc36dbd721f/binding.gyp#L27-L34

            'OTHER_CFLAGS': [
              '-arch x86_64',
              '-arch arm64'
            ],
            'OTHER_LDFLAGS': [
              '-arch x86_64',
              '-arch arm64'
            ]

[DonJayamanne]

@aminya any update on this? Thanks for looking into this.
I could send the executable as well (though, I'm not sure that's the right thing to do, i could easily add any malicious code into that).
I guess we'll wait for the official release.

[aminya]

We can add the compiler flags for the source builds, but we cannot provide prebuilds and promise anything about the functionality. We are in a situation where a company has released a new product with a new architecture with no way to test software on it. I don't think we can add official support for that product.

actions/runner-images#2187

[ni-mkrieg]

@aminya, I have similar problems when cross-compiling for arm64 on x64 MacOs using electron-builder; keytar e.g. works great by providing a pre-build for arm64. Even re-compiling externals on x64 does not work, it always ends up just with x64 support even when using your binding.gyp flags proposed above.

I can work around this for separate OS builds by pre-building on arm64 and staging the pre-build into build/Release/zeromq.node but that does not work well in the combined universal build. So it would be great to either have a branch that compiles arm64 on x64 correctly or even better a prebuilt binary for arm64.

[mbui0327]

We managed to build Zadeh, one of my native libraries, for macOS by adding the following flags. But there are no CI services or official Node for Arm64 to prebuild and test it. I requested one of my friends who has M1 to build it locally and send me the arm64 prebuild.

https://github.com/atom-community/zadeh/blob/0a5ca9a129fdfd947fa4c697dfdbbdc36dbd721f/binding.gyp#L27-L34

            'OTHER_CFLAGS': [
              '-arch x86_64',
              '-arch arm64'
            ],
            'OTHER_LDFLAGS': [
              '-arch x86_64',
              '-arch arm64'
            ]

Interesting, @aminya can you give some introduction on how to make this work with zmq? Thanks.

[mbui0327]

@aminya, I have similar problems when cross-compiling for arm64 on x64 MacOs using electron-builder; keytar e.g. works great by providing a pre-build for arm64. Even re-compiling externals on x64 does not work, it always ends up just with x64 support even when using your binding.gyp flags proposed above.

I can work around this for separate OS builds by pre-building on arm64 and staging the pre-build into build/Release/zeromq.node but that does not work well in the combined universal build. So it would be great to either have a branch that compiles arm64 on x64 correctly or even better a prebuilt binary for arm64.

@ni-mkrieg can you explain how to do this? Thank you very much.

I did npm run dev:build --build-from-source --Release on a local clone of zeromq.js but I did not get the Release folder.

[ni-mkrieg]

@mbui0327 indeed you first need to be able to get the Release built on your M1 Mac. Try this and do yarn install:

[package.json]

"scripts": {
"postinstall": "electron-builder install-app-deps"
}

Once you got the release package it up like this:

Then add the .tar.gz file to your repository e.g. in ./build/prebuilds.

Now you can cross-compile your app on your x64 Mac:
You need to stage files for the x64 and arm64 builds and also disable the rebuild of app deps during the electron build!

[pakage.json]

"scripts": {
"prebuild-x64": "electron-builder --platform=darwin --arch=x64 install-app-deps",
    "prebuild-arm64": "electron-builder --platform=darwin --arch=arm64 install-app-deps && tar -xvf ./build/prebuilds/zeromq-darwin-arm64.tar.gz -C ./node_modules/zeromq/",
"build": "run-script-os",
"build:darwin": "yarn prebuild-${ARCH} && electron-builder --${ARCH}"
}

"build": {
    "npmRebuild": false
}

That should be all you need so in your Github actions build e.g. just set the ARCH environment variable to "x64" or "arm64" and run yarn build with each once.

Does this make sense?