Installing node-sass on IBM i (formerly iSeries/ AS/400)

Question

Has anyone been able to successfully install node-sass on IBM i?

I'm currently running Node 6.9.1, and am able to install many npm packages. However, the @angular/cli has a dependency on node-sass, and apparently, node-sass has a compiled component that is giving me grief to install.

My first issue had to do with being able to download the binary itself - because of our network setup, the IBM i was unable to download the binary from:

https://github.com/sass/node-sass/releases/download/v4.5.2/aix-ppc-48_binding.node

I was getting a timeout error. I was able to resolve that by changing the SASS_BINARY_SITE to the non-https version:

export SASS_BINARY_SITE='http://github.com/sass/node-sass/releases/download'

However, now, even though the binary downloads successfully, i get the following error when npm tries to test the binary:

Testing binary Binary has a problem: Error: Could not load module /QOpenSys/QIBM/ProdData/OPS/Node6/lib/node_modules/node-sass/vendor/aix-ppc-48/binding.node. The module has an invalid magic number.

at Error (native)
at Object.Module._extensions..node (module.js:597:18)
at Module.load (module.js:487:32)
at tryModuleLoad (module.js:446:12)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:438:3)
at Module.require (module.js:497:17)
at require (internal/module.js:20:19)
at module.exports (/QOpenSys/QIBM/ProdData/OPS/Node6/lib/node_modules/node-sass/lib/binding.js:19:10)
at Object.<anonymous> (/QOpenSys/QIBM/ProdData/OPS/Node6/lib/node_modules/node-sass/lib/index.js:14:35)

And then npm tries to build the binary locally, but fails because Python2 isn't available on this machine. I can request the installation of Python2, which is a long process in our environment, but before i continue down that rabbit hole, I'd like to know if it's actually possible to have node-sass working, and if so, is there another binary that i can point the npm install at to use instead.

Or, is there an alternative means of get node-sass working?

Answer 1

As of 2017 this will likely not be possible. In addition to Python you will need the entire cpp toolchain to build node and node addons. Since this is already a very hard requirement for desktop PCs, systems like that will have a even harder time. Judging from their binding.gyp, there is just support for OS X, Windows and Linux.

node-sass is known to be hard to build also across the node use base.

Very likely you rather want to have a build / CI step on Linux that compiles your SASS files and builds your artefact.