Why does nodebb check dependencies programmatically?

o o

I'm having trouble understanding what the point of this code is:

NodeBB/src/cli/index.js at 16f0affa701fbc1b89745386d709c39179caca24 · NodeBB/NodeBB

Node.js based forum software built for the modern web - NodeBB/src/cli/index.js at 16f0affa701fbc1b89745386d709c39179caca24 · NodeBB/NodeBB

GitHub (github.com)

if (['ENOENT', 'DEP_WRONG_VERSION', 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND'].includes(e.code)) {
		console.warn('Dependencies outdated or not yet installed.');
		console.log('Installing them now...\n');
		packageInstall.updatePackageFile();
		packageInstall.preserveExtraneousPlugins();
		packageInstall.installAll();

It runs even if it's preceded by an npm install, so I'm not sure what problem it's finding. It's slowing down docker builds by quite a bit. The other issue is that if you use a faster package manager like pnpm, it's still piping everything through npm.

It would be nice if:

there was a flag to disable this behavior for environments like Docker
the package error is output with console.debug so there were some chance to solve the problem. I'm finding nodebb's internals a bit mysterious based on behavior like not surfacing errors, which is making debugging a lot harder.

PitaJ

The NodeBB repository does not have a root package.json. It has install/package.json. This is to support installing plugins stored in package.json while still being able to upgrade the dependencies of NodeBB core.

But this means that npm install does not work out of the box. Instead, our CLI detects the absence of package.json or the absence of some dependencies and will automatically install them as necessary.

This simplifies the install and upgrade process.

It's slowing down docker builds by quite a bit.

I don't see why checking the existence of a few files would slow things down like you say. Have you measured it?

The other issue is that if you use a faster package manager like pnpm, it's still piping everything through npm.

You can set your preferred package manager in config.json

oplik0

@o-o said in Why does nodebb check dependencies programmatically?:

It runs even if it's preceded by an npm install, so I'm not sure what problem it's finding.

It doesn't if it finds the correct dependencies. You can see in the code above this what the check does - verify that package.json of NodeBB dependencies matches the semver ranges specified for a given NodeBB version. Importantly, it does so only for a few deps - I'm not actually sure what criteria they were chosen on, but as long as you install the right versions of nconf (required for NodeBB config), async, chalk (probably because it's in CLI code?), commander, lodash and lru-cache NodeBB should not try to install anything.

The other issue is that if you use a faster package manager like pnpm, it's still piping everything through npm.

NodeBB can actually use npm, cnpm, pnpm or yarn depending on corepack's packageManager key in package.json, package_manager setting in config.json (https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/config/) or lock files, in that order (so corepack setting takes precedence over the rest).

But you need to somehow tell NodeBB you're using something else than npm - since due to being shipped with node it's the obvious default.

julian

@PitaJ @oplik0 Thanks guys for providing an answer that even I could not hope to match in detail

Moving this to the Dev FAQ now.

o o

Yeah thanks guys, the key was copying the package.json file out of the install folder (copying, not moving, because install/package.json is then checked during build). Now everything can be installed in one command.