Installing emsdk overwrites node on PATH

[romatthe]

This is a small but annoying issue. When installing the emscripten sdk, or whenever you install a new version of the toolchain, you're told to execute source ./emsdk_env.sh.

This is rather annoying, as the toolchain comes packaged with its own specific version of node, and this conflicts with all other node tools we're used to using. For example, it put node 4.1.1 or my path while I previously had 7.4.0. I've noticed the same goes for clang, but it doesn't bother my that much. Even when relying on a tool like nvm, it's annoying because switching to another version would essentially break emscripten/emsdk?

If emscripten is reliant on a specific version of node, should it not be its own responsibility to make sure its scripts run with its own internally packaged version? This just seems a tad messy.

(Note: One possible temporary workaround is to simply avoid emsdk_env.sh in this case and just manually add emsdk/upstream/emscripten to your path. That is all that should be needed to get emscripten working on many systems).

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because there has been no activity in the past 2 years. It will be closed automatically if no further activity occurs in the next 7 days. Feel free to re-open at any time if this issue is still relevant.

[umutzd]

Any updates?

[kripken]

Reopening, as this does sound like it would be nice to fix. I think just not adding those things to the path would be fine, as emscripten does have direct paths to them in the config file for its own use. Perhaps someone has time to test that and see if it works? If so let me know if you have any questions about how to modify the emsdk for this!

[theoparis]

Any updates again? It's been 2 years and I can't use emscripten without this being fixed as I need node.js 16 and emscripten overwrites my nvm version with 14.

Update: I found https://github.com/Sxxov/emscripten-sdk-npm and it seems to be working, node -v still reports v16.10.0.
Second update: Nevermind, once I ran a source command it started using the wrong node.js version again...

[sbc100]

We no longer inject clang or llvm into the PATH, but we do still inject our node in to the PATH.

I tried to make a change where node would only be added to the PATH if it wasn't already there:
#714

But we decided against landed it.

Do you really need to have emsdk and your own version of node active at the same time in the same shell? Can you explain a little about your use case? If its really probelem maybe we can re-open #714

In #714 it was mentioned that as a workaround you should be able to install and activate just the sub-components of the SDK without also installing node. e.g.:

./emsdk activate releases-upstream-c69458f1bbf3ef5b8da4e934de210659cc9bca04-64bit

[kleisauke]

Note that you could also do:

# Prefer the default system-installed version of Node.js
echo "NODE_JS = '$(which node)'" >> .emscripten

Just before:

# Activate PATH and other environment variables in the current terminal
source ./emsdk_env.sh

To ensure that the Node.js from emsdk doesn't clobber the PATH environment variable. FWIW, in previous versions of emsdk it was also possible to do this:

# Prefer the default system-installed version of Node.js
./emsdk uninstall $(./emsdk list | grep INSTALLED | tr -d \(\*\) | grep node | awk '{print $1}')

(from: #96 (comment))

Just before:

./emsdk activate latest

But that doesn't seems to work anymore (error: tool is not installed and therefore cannot be activated: 'node-14.15.5-64bit').

[david-fong]

Does the emsdk_env.sh script do anything other than modify the PATH? And will the emscripten tools be okay if its node executable isn't found on the path?

If so, I'm just going to settle for manually adding its stuff to the end of my path and excluding its node executable. I found it surprising (in an annoying way) that my snap installation of node wasn't the one found on my PATH.

[sbc100]

@david-fong that solution should work fine, yes. All you should really need is emcc in your PATH make emsdk work. You don't even need that if you call it directly.

emcc will find emsdk/.emscripten relative to itself and node based on the configured value in emsdk/.emscripten.. so node doesn't need to be in your PATH at all to use emsdk.