The following error occurred when using `7zip bin` after electron packaging？

[glk-hll]

[Dumspy]

So I found one workaround on my environment(Mac OS) "chmod +x 'path of 7za'" which gets things working but I wouldn't call a perfect solution

Anyone found a better way of getting things working

[marko-hologram]

This error says that it cannot execute that particular file because apparently it doesn't exist. The problem here is that app.asar is a special archive type and spawn cannot execute files that are stored there.

One solution for this is to "unpack" 7zip-bin during Electron packaging process and then reference it from that "unpacked" folder.

For example if you use electron-builder, this property in config can be used

{
  "asarUnpack": ["node_modules/7zip-bin"]
}

This tells electron-builder to move these files outside that app.asar archive and into app.asar.unpacked, which is just a regular folder. Then when requiring path to 7zip-bin, some transformation on the required path can be performed.

const asarToAsarUnpacked = (path) => {
  if (!/app\.asar\.unpacked/.test(path)) {
    const pathUnpacked = path.replace(/app\.asar/, "app.asar.unpacked");

    if (existsSync(pathUnpacked)) {
      path = pathUnpacked;
    }
  }

  return path;
};

const sevenZipBinPath = asarToAsarUnpacked(require("7zip-bin").path7za);

Hopefully this helps someone. I got to this solution through various posts, digging through some code for some open source Electron projects and who knows what else 😄

---

I know this worked for me in the past, but unfortunately it stopped working on one project where I use this technique. Not sure why it happened, but I guess I'm just overlooking something I did with dependency/environment updates in the recent past.

[marko-hologram]

I've managed to resolve my issue by kinda manually pointing to the appropriate binary file.

const getSevenZipBinPath = () => {
  let sevenZipModuleRootPath = "";

  if (App.isDevelopmentMode()) {
    // In development this require.resolve() call resolves to proper path to 7zip-bin entry file, but accessing ".path7za" exported property gives wrong path
    const sevenZipModulePath = require.resolve("7zip-bin");
    // Previous line resolves to "index.js" entry path so we just go back one path fragment to get to the root of the 7zip-bin module folder
    sevenZipModuleRootPath = path.resolve(sevenZipModulePath, "..");
  } else {
    // In production we can just access resources path and construct the rest of the path from there
    sevenZipModuleRootPath = path.join(process.resourcesPath, "app.asar.unpacked", "node_modules", "7zip-bin");
  }

  return path.join(sevenZipModuleRootPath, "win", process.arch, "7za.exe");
};

I do have to worry about Windows only so there is no code here to handle other operating systems, but it wouldn't be hard to add that if necessary.

---

Not sure what caused issues for me, but googling some stuff it seems like it might be a Webpack thing where Webpack is kinda replacing __dirname or require() calls and thus not resolving to what I would expect. That is possible since I've updated all project dependencies recently and this probably triggered all of this somewhere under the hood.