Spreadsheet Tools with Nexe

nexe¹ is a tool for generating command-line tools that embed scripts.

SheetJS is a JavaScript library for reading and writing data from spreadsheets.

This demo uses nexe and SheetJS to create a standalone CLI tool for parsing spreadsheets and converting to other formats.

The latest prebuilt package matches NodeJS version 14.15.3.

nexe can build the required packages for newer NodeJS versions.

Tested Deployments

This demo was tested in the following deployments:

Architecture	Version	NodeJS	Source	Date
darwin-x64	4.0.0-rc.6	14.15.3	Pre-built	2024-05-28
darwin-arm	4.0.0-rc.6	18.20.3	Compiled	2024-05-25
win10-x64	4.0.0-rc.4	14.15.3	Pre-built	2024-04-18
win11-arm	4.0.0-rc.6	20.10.0	Compiled	2024-05-28
linux-x64	4.0.0-rc.4	14.15.3	Pre-built	2024-03-21
linux-arm	4.0.0-rc.6	18.20.3	Compiled	2024-05-26

Integration Details

The SheetJS NodeJS module can be required from scripts. nexe will automatically handle packaging.

Script Requirements

Scripts that exclusively use SheetJS libraries and NodeJS built-in modules can be bundled using nexe.

The demo script xlsx-cli.js runs in NodeJS. It is a simple command-line tool for reading and writing spreadsheets.

Complete Example

0. Download the test file https://docs.sheetjs.com/pres.numbers:

curl -o pres.numbers https://docs.sheetjs.com/pres.numbers

1. Download xlsx-cli.js

curl -o xlsx-cli.js https://docs.sheetjs.com/cli/xlsx-cli.js

2. Install the dependencies:

npm

npm i --save https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2

pnpm

pnpm install --save https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2

Yarn

yarn add https://cdn.sheetjs.com/xlsx-0.20.3/xlsx-0.20.3.tgz exit-on-epipe commander@2

3. Create the standalone program:

npx nexe -t 14.15.3 xlsx-cli.js

Building from source (click to hide)

When the demo was tested on ARM targets, the Nexe pre-built packages were missing. For unsupported NodeJS versions, packages must be built from source:

Linux/MacOS

npx nexe xlsx-cli.js --build --python=$(which python3) --make="-j8"

Windows

On Windows x64, the --build flag suffices:

npx nexe xlsx-cli.js --build --make="-j8"

On Windows ARM, the target windows-arm64-20.10.0 must be specified:

npx nexe xlsx-cli.js --build --make="-j8" --target=windows-arm64-20.10.0

vcbuild.bat issues

The Windows ARM build may fail with a vcbuild.bat error:

Error: vcbuild.bat nosign release arm64 exited with code: 1

Pass the -v flag for more details. In the most recent test, the error stemmed from a Python version mismatch:

Node.js configure: found Python 2.7.18
Please use python3.11 or python3.10 or python3.9 or python3.8 or python3.7 or python3.6

The resolved version of Python can be found with

where python

In the most recent test, a Python 2 version appeared first. This was fixed by finding the Python 3 location and prepending it to PATH:

set PATH="C:\correct\path\to\python\three";%PATH%

This generates xlsx-cli or xlsx-cli.exe depending on platform.

5. Run the generated program, passing pres.numbers as the argument:

Linux/MacOS

./xlsx-cli pres.numbers

Windows

.\xlsx-cli.exe pres.numbers

Footnotes

1. The project does not have a website. The source repository is publicly available. ↩