How to rebuild native npm modules for Electron?

Question

Please help me to understand how to rebuild the native npm modules for Electron 1.6.2?

I used steps from https://electron.atom.io/docs/tutorial/quick-start to create a simple Electron application.
Then I installed ref package and loaded it in main.js.
ref package - it is the native package. I have to rebuild this package to have ability to use it in the Electron application.

I used following tutorial to rebuild the native package - https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/master/docs/tutorial/using-native-node-modules.md

There are 3 approaches how to rebuild the native npm packages:

1) "Installing modules and rebuilding for Electron using electron-rebuild":
I installed electron-rebuild npm package.
Then, according to tutorial, I need just to run following command:

.\node_modules\.bin\electron-rebuild.cmd  

But electron-rebuild tried to download https://atom.io/download/electron/v1.6.2/iojs-v1.6.2.tar.gz
Why it downloaded something from https://atom.io/download/electron if Electron release files are located here - https://github.com/electron/electron/releases?
Electron 1.6.2 was released only few weeks ago, but iojs-v1.6.2.tar.gz was released in Mar 2015.
Do I understand correctly that electron-rebuild downloads the wrong files?

2) Manually building packages for Electron using node-gyp.

set HOME=%USERPROFILE%/.electron-gyp  
cd ./node_modules/ref  
node-gyp rebuild --target=1.6.2 --arch=x64 --dist-url=https://atom.io/download/electron  

And here again dist-url uses https://atom.io/download/electron.
Why?
I tried do not use --dist-url.
But in this case node-gyp downloads following files:

gyp http GET https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/iojs-v1.6.2.tar.gz  
gyp http 200 https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/iojs-v1.6.2.tar.gz  
gyp http GET https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/SHASUMS256.txt  
gyp http GET https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/win-x64/iojs.lib  
gyp http GET https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/win-x86/iojs.lib  
gyp http 200 https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/SHASUMS256.txt  
gyp http 200 https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/win-x64/iojs.lib  
gyp http 200 https://iojs.org/download/release/v1.6.2/win-x86/iojs.lib 

Is it correct?

3) Rebuild native packages using npm:

rem # Electron's version.  
set npm_config_target=1.6.2  
rem # The architecture of Electron, can be ia32 or x64.  
set npm_config_arch=x64  
set npm_config_target_arch=x64  
rem # Download headers for Electron.  
rem set npm_config_disturl=https://atom.io/download/electron  
rem # Tell node-pre-gyp that we are building for Electron.  
set npm_config_runtime=electron  
rem # Tell node-pre-gyp to build module from source code.  
set npm_config_build_from_source=true  
rem # Install all dependencies, and store cache to ~/.electron-gyp.  
set HOME=%USERPROFILE\.electron-gyp  
npm install  

Again https://atom.io/download/electron.
Why?

Does anyone know how to rebuild ref native package for Electron 1.6.2 correctly?

Answer 1

You are correct, the version given to node-gyp maps to the Electron version not the internal node version as that is the version where the headers are uploaded to. There is actually a more complex explanation behind all this but it shouldn't matter to the end user. The code you provided is correct and from the docs. It works. No need to understand the inner workings of why.