Add support for Node > 8

[Dabolus]

This PR adds support for Node > 8 by updating the node-pre-gyp dependency of the Node binding for Snowboy. I tested it locally using Node 10.15.0 and it builds without any issues. Updating this dependency will also fix some severe vulnerabilities caused by the outdated dependency. The only small downside is that node-pre-gyp dropped the support for Node 0.10.x (which was released more than 5 years ago and reached its end of life 2 years ago, so it shouldn't be a big problem). Node 10 and 11 have also been added to Travis matrix.

Fixes #536

[evancohen]

Happy New Year! I think this is a worth while change.
It's 2019, the node bindings should support Node > 8 🤣. Happy to test this out and confirm it works if that will get it merged.

[evancohen]

I made this change on my own local branch evancohen@a6e3c83, and it looks like the build for Node 8.0.0 failed: https://travis-ci.org/evancohen/snowboy/builds/477664987

@Dabolus do you know why that might be? It looks like node-pre-gyp isn't found, just for that version, on both OSX and Linux. For some odd reason the work-around that I had in .travis.yml#L52 doesn't work in this case.

[Dabolus]

@evancohen that's really strange. I tried to build on Travis too with my repo and I had the exact same issue. However, if I follow the same steps with Node 8.0.0 installed with nvm on my local machine, everything works like a charm. Still investigating.

BTW probably not related, but I think that Travis should not run on Node x.0.0, but on the latest minor.patch of each Node version. The first release of each new major always has some bugs.

[evancohen]

This is likely to do with some funky change that was made in the way that the 8.x version of Node/npm reads or sets environmental variables.

Speaking of major releases always having some bugs, maybe using the latest version of 8.x will solve the issue! I kicked off a build with that (evancohen@2d51ae0) here:
https://travis-ci.org/evancohen/snowboy/builds/478843913

Edit: and would you look at that! Green across the board 🍾

[Dabolus]

Glad to know that worked! Updating my branch too right now. It would be great to have some feedback from Snowboy maintainers, though.

[WoodySlum]

Hi, thanks for fixing. Would it be possible to merge ? I had to disable snowboy in my app due to unsupport of node 10 on rpi.

[imrrahul]

LGTM ! It will be very useful if added in documentation

[mreinstein]

can we please get this merged? Node 6 is on the verge of being deprecated https://nodejs.org/en/about/releases/

[evancohen]

I did some investigating and I put together an easy way to install snowboy (v1.3.1) that is compatible with Node 6-12 and has precompiled binaries for darwin (OSX), x64 (most Linux), and ARM (Pi). All you've got to do is run:

npm install snoyboy@sonus

[louistiti]

Thanks @evancohen!

It works like a charm.

[sdetweil]

@evancohen Evan, the npm install snowboy@sonus, did not work on node 10.17(today), ubuntu on armv71. same compile failure as before

the error is unable to find module nan
Error: Cannot find module 'nan'

but you cannot install nan , as it fails to build snowboy... round and round

[evancohen]

Not sure why this stopped working all of a sudden, I'll take a look when I get the chance.
Happy thanksgiving 🦃

[MrWook]

Any updates for this?
Would love to use snowboy

[scomans]

For those who get the nan error and use Yarn you can do add the following to your package.json:

  "resolutions": {
    "snowboy/node-pre-gyp": "^0.14.0"
  }

[louistiti]

Hello everyone 👋,

Since a while, with the npm install snoyboy@sonus fix I was getting the following error after the install:

Error: Cannot find module 'nan'

I forked it and moved the nan module from the devDependencies to dependencies in the package.json file.
Also, I updated node-pre-gyp to @mapbox/node-pre-gyp as the original one seems deprecated.

My fork is currently working with Node.js 14.16.0.

Hope that helps.

[Dabolus]

Well, my PR is quite outdated and this repo has been abandoned since a long time, so I will close it to tidy things up. Check one of the many forks if you need to use snowboy in applications using an up-to-date Node.js version.