Plugin fails because of wrong installation path

[fcastellanos]

Actual Behaviour

Plugin silently failing at installation

sls dynamodb install

Expected Behaviour

Some feedback when it fails.

Steps to reproduce it

• serverless 1.30.1
• macOS High Sierra 10.13.4
• Node v7.2.1

$ serverless create --template aws-python3 --path python-dynamo-tmp
...
$ npm install --save serverless-dynamodb-local
...
sls dynamodb install

Installing dynamodb does nothing.

This is my serverless.yml

service: python-dynamo-tmp

provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: python3.6

plugins:
  - serverless-dynamodb-local

LogCat for the issue

After several hours of a headache since I just started looking into serverless and I'm not a Node.js developer it occurred to me to search the code base for something and I landed on the utils.js inside $project_path/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb/ and I added console.log(.. to print out the absolute path of the installation folder since nothing was being created and nothing was being printed to the terminal, this was the output...

/Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb//Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/.dynamodb

Which was weird so what I did was to rewrite the absPath to just return the relPath parameter...

var absPath = function (relPath) {
    return relPath;
};

After that change I ran again the installation again but now successfully creating the .dynamodb directory in my project's path, but now whenever I try to start the dynamodb service I get this...

$ sls dynamodb start
Dynamodb Local Started, Visit: http://localhost:8000/shell
Error: Unable to access jarfile DynamoDBLocal.jar
DynamoDB Local failed to start with code 1

I added a bunch more loggers all over the place and ended up in $project_path/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb/config.json where the install_path is just /bin so I changed it to...

{
    "setup": {
        "download_url": "http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/dynamodb-local/dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz",
        "install_path": "/Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/.dynamodb",
        "jar": "DynamoDBLocal.jar"
    },
    "start": {
        "port": 8000
    }
}

After making those changes everything works, I mean, I run sls dynamodb start without any errors and I can even go to http://localhost:8000/shell and see the DynamoDB Web Shell

Would you like to work on the issue?

I'm no node.js developer or serverless expert but I can help however I can.

Thanks!

[kalote]

Same here, issue was fixed by running

rm -rf node_modules
rm package-lock.json
npm cache clean --force
npm i -D serverless-dynamodb-local@0.2.25

[fcastellanos]

Did not work plus there is no package-lock.json file.

[kenleytomlin]

@fcastellanos I found the same issue with serverless version 1.30.1 and serverless-dynamodb-local version 0.2.31.

Downgrading serverless-dynamodb-local to version 0.2.30 fixed the issue.

[choxnox]

I can confirm I'm hitting the same problem here and that installing version 0.2.30 fixes the problem.

[jrschumacher]

The problem is because they did not update npm registry. Also, the [99xt/dynamodb-localhost] tags don't exist so it is hard to see which version is being installed.

[jrschumacher]

Okay so a couple of really big issues:

1. Neither this package or its dependency uses tags which correlate with the NPM package.
2. This package isn't using the latest fixed version of dynamodb-local which fixes the relative path issue (which you wouldn't know about because they don't render an error on a catch)
3. This package passes the correct location of the install path, but that is being overridden by a hardcoded value This is another issue with not loading the correct version

[dpickett]

I experienced this issue on v0.2.35 and downgrading to 0.2.30 fixed the issue. install and start were silently failing.

Interestingly it did not fail on a different computer. The main differences were the working machine was running node v8.9.1, JDK1.8(8) and the nonfunctional machine was running node v10.6.0, JDK11

Thinking it could be a node version issue, I switched the node version on the nonfunctional machine. It still silently failed.

[Roustalski]

Visiting here from stack overflow. I have been on v0.2.35 with no problems until today with the release of 0.2.36. I am staying on 35 and watching this for resolution.

[cjnoname]

Make sure that you use the --config if you don't have a serverless.yml file in your current folder.

Sample:
"install-dynamodb": "sls dynamodb install --config serverless-local.yml",