README · Changelog · Development

Forked version of node-ffi-generate

• Used by node-ffi-packager to generate node-ffi-libraries.
• Depends on a similarly forked node-libclang.
• Use this version by referencing the repository/branch in package.json instead of the official version published on npm.
• Based on node-ffi-generate (5ad34dc, v0.0.8) by Timothy J Fontaine.

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node-ffi-generate

A tool to generate Node.js Foreign Function Interface (FFI) bindings for a given C/C++ header file. Based on node-libclang.

Installation

For command line usage.

# NOTE: global installation is not necessary, but convenient for command line usage.
npm install --global github:node-ffi-packager/node-ffi-generate#semver:^v2.0.2

For programmatic usage.

npm install --save github:node-ffi-packager/node-ffi-generate#semver:^v2.0.2

Requirements

• Selected parts of the The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure.
  • The llvm-config tool.
    • Used to automatically look up the location of libclang, but it can be manually configured.
    • Try symlinking versioned executables (such as llvm-config-9) to llvm-config in your PATH.
  • The libclang library.
    • Indirectly required by node-libclang.
  • Installing using a package manager is strongly recommended.

CLI usage

Parse the given header file and print the rendered javascript to standard. Fast and simple to use.

ffi-generate --file '/path/to/myLibrary/header.h' --library 'libmyLibrary'

Usage

Generate node-ffi-napi javascript bindings for a given C/C++ header file

Options:
  -f, --file         The header file to parse                                                              [required]
  -l, --library      The name of the library to dlopen                                                     [required]
  -x, --single-file  Only export functions found in this file
  -p, --prefix       Only import functions whose name start with prefix. Can be specified multiple times.

Extra libclang arguments

It may be necessary to pass additional flags/arguments to libclang so it can better parse the header (for example include paths). To pass options directly to libclang use -- so ffi-generate knows to stop parsing arguments. The rest will be passed to libclang without modification.

ffi-generate --file '/usr/include/ImageMagick/wand/MagickWand.h' --library 'libMagickWand' --prefix 'Magick' -- $(Magick-config --cflags)

Programmatic usage

• See lib/generateffi.js for options to pass.
• See examples/.

Location of libclang

Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on macOS) might be necessary for ffi-generate to find the libclang dynamic library. For the ffi-generate command, this is performed internally by calling llvm-config. For programmatic use try setting it manually as an environment variable.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(llvm-config --libdir)" node my-generator-code.js

Debugging

Get additional debug messages by setting the DEBUG environment variable.

 DEBUG='ffi-generate:*' ffi-generate <other arguments as usual>

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node-ffi-generate Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 Timothy J Fontaine, © 2020, 2021 Joel Purra. Released under MIT License.