No rule to make target '../.node-gyp/0.10.36/common.gypi', needed by 'Makefile

[jywarren]

In voodootikigod/node-serialport#535 (comment) I've been documenting a difficulty with installing serialport which depends on node-pre-gyp, and have seen the following error (or possibly two):

gyp WARN EACCES user "root" does not have permission to access the dev dir "/root/.node-gyp/0.10.36"
gyp WARN EACCES attempting to reinstall using temporary dev dir "/usr/local/lib/node_modules/serialport/.node-gyp"
make: Entering directory '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/serialport/build'
make: *** No rule to make target '../.node-gyp/0.10.36/common.gypi', needed by 'Makefile'.  Stop.
make: Leaving directory '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/serialport/build'

Is this a node-pre-gyp issue or a node-serialport issue? If the latter, please feel free to close, but is there perhaps a patch I could submit to node-serialport to resolve it? Thanks in advance for any help.

[springmeyer]

hi @jywarren! Nice to see ya, but sorry about the trouble. Those errors look related to permissions only. Are you perhaps running as root? If so can you run as a normal user? I'm aware that npm does not work correctly when run as root unless you also pass --unsafe-perm npm/npm#3497.

That said if this is not the issue happy to try to help more. Basically node-pre-gyp and node-gyp both need to be callable as command line tools. So if permissions are off they often break, but the underlying problem can only be fixed by fixing permissions.

[maxogden]

Hi Dane and Jeff! Funny finding you on this corner of the Internet today :)

I got the same error when running this dockerfile today, it blows up when running the npm install dat as dat uses leveldown which uses node-pre-gyp.

I tried adding RUN npm install node-gyp-install -g and RUN node-gyp-install to the above Dockerfile but that didn't help. I'll post back if I figure out if it's a permissions thing I can fix or not...

[springmeyer]

@maxogden hi! thanks for helping out. Okay, so sounds like there must be some bad interaction of node-pre-gyp somehow. Are you able to replicate outside of docker? Let me know what you find.

[maxogden]

here's what fixed it for us mafintosh/try-dat@88c7527. not sure what the underlying cause is though

[springmeyer]

If that fixed it then the cause is likely:

• you are running as root
• therefore npm blocks usage of command line tools
• therefore somewhere in the logs there is likely a cannot run in wd message which indicates that npm blocked the call to node-pre-gyp

It's not clear to me there is any other workaround other than --unsafe-perm as per npm/npm#3497.

Over at #162 we are revisiting the idea of whether some other way of calling node-pre-gyp might solve other edge cases. Like "install": "node -e \"require('node-pre-gyp').install()\"". But I fear that shelling out to node might still incur this problem and npm would block it when root?

[jywarren]

Thanks, we'll try that! Great to see you both here :-)

[springmeyer]

noticed that when npm denies being able to run node-pre-gyp when running as root the problem is not an error but an early return: https://github.com/npm/npm/blob/4e7db7dab54bf30615caa2e8f3c6b2db6b59c258/lib/utils/lifecycle.js#L54-L57

So that explains why this results in such confusing later errors because the install state is undefined.

[springmeyer]

I wonder if there is some way to catch when root is being used with npm and stop the process with a clearer message. /cc @othiym23 for ideas.

[springmeyer]

@othiym23 - can you help advise on this problem? Should I recommend people not run as root? Should I recommend always passing --unsafe-perm when using docker + node installs? Is there something I can change about node-pre-gyp that would avoid this pitfall completely? As docker grows in popularity this is starting to happen frequently: mapbox/node-sqlite3#474