CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitdockernpm
Tomasz Kapłoński
Tomasz Kapłoński

Reputation: 1378

NPM install fails in dockerized env

I am trying to set up some legacy project with docker. To do so I have created a main repository with docker files and added actual project as a submodule. As a result I have:

root
|- data
|- etc
|  |-php
|  |-etc
|- project
|  |- .git
|  |- (actual project files)
|- docker-compose.yml
|- .dockerignore

In such setup the project/.git is just a text file containing gitdir: ../.git/modules/project.

Now, in docker-compose.yml I have following volume mapped:

- ${APP_PATH}:/var/www/html

Within this container I install npm install (I know I should prepare separate container for node and I will do it in the future but for now I need to run what I do have) and this ends up with following git

root@06fc2e3fe52a:/var/www/html# npm install
npm ERR! Error while executing:
npm ERR! /usr/bin/git ls-remote -h -t ssh://[email protected]/bengourley/stack-generator.git
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! fatal: Not a git repository: ../.git/modules/project

I have already created following .dockerignore file:

project/.git
project/.gitignore
project/.gitattributes
.git
Dockerfile
.DS_Store
.gitignore
README.md
/tmp/*

Is it possible to make this work without mapping a root docker directory above the www in container so that this npm install could go through?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 720

Answers (2)

Paflow
Paflow

Reputation: 2347

I had the very same problem but could solve it with a .dockerignore-file.

src/.git
src/.gitignore
src/.gitattributes

but at the level of the Dockerfile (while src is the sub-repo), not on the top-level.

Upvotes: 1

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1323055

Is it possible to make this work without mapping a root docker directory above the www in container so that this npm install could go through?

That might be a bit of a challenge, considering that within the docker build process, all Git-related folder are ignored (per your .dockerignore file).

I'd really need an answer on how to handle npm install in connection with git subrepositories

That is what npm issue 6700 is about.
It proposes several approaches:

  • a postinstall script to initialize your git submodules. As in this example
  • checking out all the git repositories into parallel directories, e.g.,
src/
src/mod1
src/mod2
src/mod3

and then use npm link to connect the dependencies:

$ cd src/mod1
$ npm link
# this makes a link from the system-wide node_modules to the current dir 
$ cd ../mod2
$ npm link mod1
# this makes a link from node_modules/mod1 to ../mod2

That way if you make changes in mod1 or mod2, they can be committed to the appropriate git repository, and you can see the changes right away without having to re-install, re-download etc.

The second approach is promising, provided you can mount a pre-initialized submodule repo into a separate path, and use npm link to reference the right folder while still being in /var/www/html.

Upvotes: 2

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