Getting firebase and grpc working under termux

Published December 10, 2017 #chromebook #howto

firebase depends on grpc, which isn’t set to build right on the Chromebook. This is because node-pre-gyp, which is used to download precompiled binaries, is not setup correctly. In then uses node-gyp to compile the C++ bindings directly, which is also not setup correctly.

We are going to adjust the settings of node-gyp to make it compile things right under termux, and then we are going to tweak the grpc package itself in our local cache to make it build correctly.

This took way to long to sort out.

Installing the Basics

1. pkg install nodejs python2 make clang pkg-config
2. termux-chroot
3. cd /bin; ln -s python2 python
4. mkdir /tmp/t; cd /tmp/t
5. npm install -g yarn

Start the grpc install

1. yarn add grpc
2. This should take a long time but then fail because -zdefs is not a valid option.

Update node-gyp settings

First we update node-gyp, as talked about here.

1. cd ~/. node-gyp/8.9.3/include/node (or whatever version you have)
2. Update common.gpyi to change references of -fPIE to -fPIC, and get rid of -pie

Update the grpc npm package in the yarn cache

1. cd ~/.cache/yarn/v1/npm-grpc (tab tab to find the actual version)
2. open up bindings.gyp and remove the line ‘-zdefs’ which for me is line 941
3. Also in deps/grpc/bindings.gyp remove -zdefs again. Not sure where this is coming from but clang doesn’t like it.

Note that every time there’s another version of grpc released, you’ll need to update that version in your yarn cache!

Try to add again

1. cd /tmp/t
2. rm -rf node_modules/grpc
3. yarn add grpc

And there you go. Does anyone have a better fix that they could share?