JS Electron fails to run

Environments Windows
1

I have a project that suddenly stopped to build on Windows with Electron. I mean I have a matrix that runs same build on linux/macos/windows with nodejs/electron, and pair windows + electron started to fail recently.

My initial thought was that I broke it somehow, though I didn’t touch anything related to the build script or electron. After couple of days trying to fix it I found out that electron fails regardless if it runs with our code or not. I.e., it fails with the same error even after electron --version.

The error is:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/electron --version
C:/ProgramData/nvs/node/12.16.1/x64/node.exe: error while loading shared libraries: ?: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It supposed to show output like

$ ./node_modules/.bin/electron --version
v7.1.5

Maybe something has changed on Travis side that causes Electron failure?

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2

I have simplified version to demonstrate the issue:

- yarn global add electron@7.1.14
- electron --version

Output:

The command "electron --version" exited with 127.
C:/ProgramData/nvs/node/12.16.1/x64/node.exe: error while loading shared libraries: ?: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
3

There is a demo project: https://travis-ci.org/splix/travis-electron-issue

The .travis.yml is just:

os:
  - osx
  - linux
  - windows

language: node_js

env:
  global:
      # needed for linux, removing it doesn't fix windows issue
    - ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=true

node_js:
  - 12

script:
  - npm install -g electron@7.1.14
  - electron --version

Fails with:

$ electron --version

The command "electron --version" exited with 127.

Done. Your build exited with 1.

C:/ProgramData/nvs/node/12.16.1/x64/node.exe: error while loading shared libraries: ?: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
4

Do you have a build log URL to a passing Windows job? If you restart it and it fails now, the most likely explanation is that some underlying dependency changed and broke the build.

5

That’s interesting. I restarted an old build and it succeeded. Though any new build, even the empty project created to demonstrate the issue are always failing.

6

But it’s still doesn’t solve the problem, because I’m still unable to run even a simple projects (like in the demo) that uses Electron. Would appreciate any suggestions hot to make it working

7

After some debugging I found out that the original error is

error while loading shared libraries: dxva2.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Electron, which is based on Chromium, expects to find DirectX Video Acceleration library. Though I run it only as a testing environment, i.e., console only, Electron is still linked to that dll. I tried to install DirectX (choco install directx) but it doesn’t work on Travis, and I don’t have any idea how to get that library installed.

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