Hazardous

This module overloads some functions of the path module of Electron in order to workaround a painful behaviour with the asar files.

The problem concerns the cases where a .asar.unpacked/* file must be passed to an executable somewhere on the filesystem. This executable can not access to the files packed in the .asar archive. In this case, when the .asar archive is created, it's possible to specify directories to keep unpacked, but it's not sufficient.

Example

An example will be, Perl scripts. You cannot run .pl scripts from Electron, but you can spawn perl and pass the .pl script as argument. Imagine that the .pl script is in a node_modules and this one is in the .asar archive. When you spawn perl, you catch an error because perl cannot access to app.asar/node_modules/perl-module/script.pl.

Then you try to package by this way:

asar pack app app.asar --unpack-dir "**/node_modules/perl-module/**"

The result looks good. You can see the app.asar file and the app.asar.unpacked directory with the perl-module and the perl scripts.

But when you try to use your app, you continue to receive an error because perl cannot find script.pl.

What is the real purpose of .asar.unpacked?

It seems that it's only useful with executables. If you have an executable in a node_modules, it makes sense to use the unpack way because the spawn and exec functions of child_process are aware of .asar.unpacked. Then your executable can be used transparently.

Hazardous workaround

The idea is to overload three functions of path (join (), normalize () and resolve ()).

These functions are wrapped by hazardous in order to detect if the location is in .asar.unpacked or not. If it's impossible to guess, it just returns the original responses of the real path functions.

Note that only absolute locations are considered by hazardous. With relative locations it's impossible to know if the user wants the __dirname of the caller function or the current working dir (cwd ()).

How to use

npm i --save hazardous

Just insert (at the beginning of your main script):

'use strict';
 
require ('hazardous');
const path = require ('path');
 
const script = path.join (__dirname, 'script.pl');
/* script = /home/foo/bar/app.asar.unpacked/node_modules/perl-module/script.pl */
/* -----------------------------------^                                        */

The path functions must be used only after that hazardous has been loaded.

If you use the previous code without require ('hazardous'), then the script value will be:

/* script = /home/foo/bar/app.asar/node_modules/perl-module/script.pl */
/* ------------------------------^                                    */