The solution of lacking libudev.so.0

Due to the removal of `libudev0` and its associated library `libudev.so.0`, node-webkit isn’t able to run on newer distributions such as:

• Ubuntu 13.04+
• Fedora 18+
• Arch
• Gentoo
• Derivatives of the above

…and possibly others. Until node-webkit is updated to depend on the currently shipped version `libudev.so.1`, the following solutions should provide a stopgap measure for packaging your applications.

1. Use a wrapper shell script for your application.
In this method, we rename the binary executable file as `myapp-bin`, and then create a shell script named `myapp` as the following. Users will then run the `myapp` file to launch your application.

#!/bin/bash
MYAPP_WRAPPER="`readlink -f "$0"`"
HERE="`dirname "$MYAPP_WRAPPER"`"

# Always use our versions of ffmpeg libs.
# This also makes RPMs find our library symlinks.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$([ -n "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ] && echo "$HERE:$HERE/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" || echo "$HERE:$HERE/lib")

exec -a "$0" "$HERE/myapp-bin"  "$@"

Creating a symlink for your package in the postinstall script

In the postinstall script of your DEB or RPM package, run the following script to create a local symlink. Use this together with the previous wrapper script.

#!/bin/bash
paths=(
  "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1" # Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint
  "/usr/lib64/libudev.so.1" # SUSE, Fedora
  "/usr/lib/libudev.so.1" # Arch, Fedora 32bit
  "/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1" # Ubuntu 32bit
)
for i in "${paths[@]}"
do
  if [ -f $i ]
  then
    ln -sf "$i" /opt/myapp/libudev.so.0
    break
  fi
done

2. Modify the nw binary itself

In this method, we navigate (via command line) to the directory containing the nw binary and run the following:

sed -i 's/udev\.so\.0/udev.so.1/g' nw

As should be obvious, this method comes with increased risk of damaging the nw executable and should only be attempted by skilled users which understand what the command is doing.