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Getting started

This document assumes that you are already familiar with the related basic knowledge.

Structure#

V8 Killer consists of a core part and a launcher part.
The former part runs inside the target process and inline hooks the V8 engine's compilation-related functions when the module is loaded. The latter is responsible for starting the program and loading the core into the target program.

Obtain Binary Files#

Manual GitHub Actions CI runs provide Linux x64 and Windows x64 MSVC release artifacts for 7 days. PR runs upload only regression JSON reports. The native MSVC configuration still awaits its first remote validation. Keep v8_killer_launcher.exe and v8_killer_core.dll together. Windows uses the Microsoft Visual C++ x64 runtime, available on the CI runner; GNU runtime DLLs are no longer part of the artifacts. If you need to build it yourself, please refer to Development.

CI covers Node 22/24/26 on Linux x64 and Windows x64 (MSVC). macOS support is experimental, with no CI tests.

Writing Configuration Files#

The configuration file is a TOML file, which includes function locators and injection rules.
At present, we have not yet provided a JSON Schema for TOML files. Please refer to the example files given in /examples/configs.

Using the Launcher#

The launcher will look for the configuration file based on environment variables. You need to set the V8_KILLER_CONFIG_FILE_PATH environment variable and point its value to the absolute path of the configuration file.

Linux / macOS#

macOS uses the experimental implementation; the example below is validated on Linux only. Here is an example script that has been tested on Arch Linux:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
export V8_KILLER_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=/path/to/config/file/config.toml
v8_killer_launcher "/usr/bin/node" -- "/path/to/js/main.js"

Windows#

You can use PowerShell scripts or cmd batch files to start the launcher: 

# PowerShell
$env:V8_KILLER_CONFIG_FILE_PATH = "C:\path\to\config\file\config.toml"
& "C:\path\to\v8_killer_launcher.exe" "C:\path\to\executable\node.exe" -- "C:\path\to\js\main.js"

:: cmd
set V8_KILLER_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=C:\path\to\config\file\config.toml
"C:\path\to\v8_killer_launcher.exe" "C:\path\to\executable\node.exe" -- "C:\path\to\js\main.js"

Please note that in Windows, it is allowed to configure global environment variables, but we don't need to do so. We only need to set temporary environment variables in the script.