JSDom on Azure (Native Node.js modules)

Question

I'm having trouble getting a nodejs app which relies on JSDom to work on Azure due to it depending on a native module - Contextify, I understand Azure does not provide compilation for native modules.

However according to Azure documentation

Since Windows Azure Cloud Services rely on the node_modules folder being deployed as part of the application, any native module included as part of the installed modules should work in a cloud service as long as it was installed and compiled on a Windows development system.

It all works fine on my dev box as it's compiled during npm install, what I don't understand is why it isn't working on Azure as I am providing the compiled version? If it works on my windows dev box the compilation is clearly successful. I deploy to azure form a local git repository so I'm wondering if the compiled files are being left out when I commit?

Answer 1

UPDATE: the latest Azure release (specifically, the Mobile Services backend) supports arbitrary NPM modules - See the section on Mobile Services: NPM Module Support

From the JSDom docs on the npm:

Unfortunately, doing this kind of magic requires C++. And in Node.js, using C++ from JavaScript means using "native modules." Native modules are compiled at installation time so that they work precisely for your machine; that is, you don't download a contextify binary from npm, but instead build one locally after downloading the source from npm.

https://npmjs.org/package/jsdom#contextify

Since your "native modules" don't have the same signature as whatever machine in azure's "native module" would be signed, it doesn't load.