node-gles-webgl2

Headless WebGL2 / OpenGL ES 3 runtime for Node.js backed by ANGLE.

This package is a fork of node-gles. It preserves the existing WebGL1 surface and exposes additional GLES3-backed APIs through WebGL2-compatible JavaScript method names.

WebGL2 Coverage

Feature	Status
Runtime and context lifecycle	✅
WebGL1 API and selected extension aliases	✅
WebGL2 core method names	✅
VAO, instancing, draw buffers, and multisample framebuffers	✅
Buffer, sampler, sync, and PBO operations	✅
WebGL2 uniform and matrix APIs	✅
3D textures and 2D texture arrays	✅
Queries, transform feedback, and integer vertex attributes	✅
Browser-compatible overloads and error semantics	🟡
Browser-complete WebGL2 conformance	❌

Platform Support

Platform	CI
Linux x64
Linux arm64
macOS arm64
macOS x64
Windows x64
Windows arm64

macOS x64 is build-only in CI because hosted-runner smoke currently hits Error: No display.

Extension Support

getSupportedExtensions() reports WebGL extension names, not raw GL_* ANGLE extension strings. Runtime availability still depends on the selected ANGLE backend.

Exposed

• ANGLE_instanced_arrays
• EXT_blend_minmax
• EXT_color_buffer_float / WEBGL_color_buffer_float
• EXT_color_buffer_half_float
• EXT_frag_depth
• EXT_float_blend
• EXT_sRGB
• EXT_shader_texture_lod
• EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic
• EXT_texture_mirror_clamp_to_edge
• OES_element_index_uint
• OES_standard_derivatives
• OES_texture_float / OES_texture_float_linear
• OES_texture_half_float / OES_texture_half_float_linear
• OES_vertex_array_object
• WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc / WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc_srgb
• WEBGL_debug_renderer_info
• WEBGL_depth_texture
• WEBGL_draw_buffers
• WEBGL_lose_context

Not Exposed

• EXT_disjoint_timer_query / EXT_disjoint_timer_query_webgl2

Install

From npm:

npm install node-gles-webgl2

Usage

const nodeGles = require("node-gles-webgl2");

const gl = nodeGles.createWebGLRenderingContext({
  width: 800,
  height: 500,
  majorVersion: 3,
  minorVersion: 0,
});

console.log(gl.getParameter(gl.VERSION));

Context Options

• width / height: drawing buffer size, default 1.
• majorVersion / minorVersion: requested OpenGL ES version, default 3.0.
• webGLCompatibility: requests ANGLE WebGL compatibility mode. The legacy misspelled webGLCompability option is still accepted as an alias.
• enabledExtensions: optional WebGL extension allowlist. When set, only listed supported extensions are exposed.
• disabledExtensions: optional WebGL extension blocklist. This takes precedence over enabledExtensions.

Context Lifecycle

For batch rendering, call gl.destroy() or gl.dispose() after the final readPixels() for a context. This releases the native EGL context and pbuffer surface immediately instead of waiting for JavaScript garbage collection.

const gl = nodeGles.createWebGLRenderingContext({ width: 3000, height: 2000 });

try {
  // render and readPixels
} finally {
  gl.destroy();
}

Build From Source

From git:

git clone https://github.com/dsafdsaf132/node-gles-webgl2.git
cd node-gles-webgl2
npm install --ignore-scripts
node scripts/install.js
npm run build

From a release source tarball, use the same commands after extracting the archive. Source tarballs do not contain deps/angle; node scripts/install.js downloads ANGLE into that directory before building the addon.

scripts/install.js downloads the latest matching ANGLE prebuilt archive from dsafdsaf132/angle-prebuilt into deps/angle and builds the native addon with node-gyp. If a complete ANGLE out/Release directory is already present and matches the selected release, the installer reuses it.

Installer overrides:

• NODE_GLES_ANGLE_RELEASE_REPOSITORY: GitHub release repository, default dsafdsaf132/angle-prebuilt
• NODE_GLES_ANGLE_RELEASE_TAG: GitHub release tag, default latest
• NODE_GLES_ANGLE_VERSION and NODE_GLES_ANGLE_BASE_URI: legacy explicit archive URL mode
• NODE_GLES_ANGLE_SHA256: optional archive checksum verification
• NODE_GLES_GITHUB_TOKEN: optional GitHub API token for release lookups

On Linux, the native build needs X11 development headers. On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential python3 libx11-dev libxext-dev

License

This package is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.

node-gles-webgl2 is a fork of node-gles. Original source files retain their upstream copyright notices, including Google LLC / Google Inc. notices where applicable. Modifications in this repository add WebGL2 / OpenGL ES 3 bindings, packaging, CI, and publishing workflows for node-gles-webgl2.