[Bug] Overriding the core ORM and Sockets hooks is difficult with npm v3 and later

[jeremy-albuixech]

Sails version: 0.12.7
Node version: 6.7.0
NPM version: 3.10.8
Operating system: Mac OSX El Capitan

---

To override a core hook, you can create a new module and name it similarly as the core hook but under a different scope (for example, @ioredis/sails-hook-sockets) and with the sails.isHook = true in the package.json.

In the moduleLoader hooks library of Sails, the nodeModulesFolder function goes through the node_modules folder in order to search for hooks to load, with a max depth of 3.

The issue is that with npm v3, the node_module folder is flattened, so the max depth does not apply. For example, since sails requires the sails-hook-sockets module, instead of being under node_modules/sails/node_modules/sails-hook-sockets, it's now directly under /node_modules/sails-hook-sockets.

What it means is that if your custom hook has a sort order inferior (alphabetically I guess) in regards to the core hook, the custom hook will get loaded first and then overwritten by the core hook.

To reproduce you can follow these steps:

1. Include the version of the sails-hooks-socket we use: https://github.com/BroadsoftLabs/sails-hook-sockets to your project's package.json
2. Make sure you have nothing under the node_modules folder (rm -rf node_modules) and do a npm install
3. Lift your sail application with the verbose log level to see all the user-related hooks logging information

You will see the following logs:

What's happening here: sails finds my custom hook (under node_modules/@bsft/sails-hook-sockets) but then finds the core hook (under node_modules/sails-hook-sockets), so it loads that one instead.

The same issue probably applies to the ORM hook since it's also required as a dependency and not part of the sails core libraries.

I will try to contribute through a PR to fix this issue.

I created a repository here that you can use to quickly reproduce the issue: https://github.com/albi34/sails-issue-hooks

[mikermcneil]

@Albi34 Thanks for the detailed explanation - will take a look this afternoon.

---

As a temporary workaround, if, in your app.js, you modify the code such that you pass in sails.config.hooks programmatically:

  // Start server
  sails.lift(require('lodash').extend(config,
    hooks: {
      sockets: require('uchub-sails-hook-sockets')
    }
  }));

then you should be able to override the default by lifting with node app.js.

[sgress454]

Alright, this is patched on master -- the hook loader will ignore the default installed hooks (sails-hook-sockets, sails-hook-orm and sails-hook-helpers) so that they can be safely overridden. The workaround should get you going on v0.12 until then. Thanks for posting @Albi34!