libvips and its dependencies are provided as pre-compiled shared libraries for the most common operating systems and CPU architectures.

During npm install, these binaries are fetched as tarballs from Bintray via HTTPS and stored locally within node_modules/sharp.

A custom tarball stored on the local filesystem can be used instead. Place it in the following location, where x.y.z is the libvips version, platform is the value of process.platform and arch is the value of process.arch (plus the version number for ARM).

node_modules/sharp/packaging/libvips-x.y.z-platform-arch.tar.gz

For example, for libvips v8.3.3 on an ARMv6 Linux machine, use:

node_modules/sharp/packaging/libvips-8.3.3-linux-armv6.tar.gz

Remove any sharp/lib and sharp/include directories before running npm install again.

Most people will not need to do this; proceed with caution.

The packaging directory contains the top-level build script.

One build script is used to (cross-)compile the same shared libraries within multiple containers.

• x64
• ARMv6
• ARMv7-A
• ARMv8-A

The QEMU user mode emulation binaries are required to build for the ARMv6 platform as the Debian armhf cross-compiler erroneously generates unsupported Thumb 2 instructions.

sudo apt-get install qemu-user-static

The output of libvips' build-win64 "web" target is post-processed within a container.

See package-libvips-darwin.