Unexpected "not a child of" error

[ashubham]

I'm opening this issue because:

• npm is crashing.
• npm is producing an incorrect install.
• npm is doing something I don't understand.
• Other (see below for feature requests):

What's going wrong?

Basically I would want to reopen #17637. Because I still see this with npm 5.3.0 and node 8.4

How can the CLI team reproduce the problem?

package.json should contain a relative path to a dependency, which in turn contains some
optional dependencies. (fsevents) in my case.

gist: https://gist.github.com/ashubham/da37468a1033af23113938036522a036

supporting information:

OS: Linux

[jeffhallrsn]

I'm also seeing this issue with npm 5.3.0 and node 8.4 and fsevents in a monorepo style repo.

npm ERR! /blabla/node_modules/fsevents/node_modules/abbrev is not a child of /blabla2

[sulliwane]

Same issue here with current docker node:8.4.0-alpine node v8.4.0 and npm 5.3.0

npm ERR! /home/node/app/node_modules/fsevents/node_modules/abbrev is not a child of /home/node/.npm-global/lib

Edit 1: here is my Dockerfile (my node app is a cli I need to install in global PATH)

FROM node:8.4.0-alpine

ENV user node
ENV PATH=/home/node/.npm-global/bin:$PATH
ENV NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX=/home/node/.npm-global


RUN mkdir /home/$user/app
COPY . /home/$user/app/
RUN chown -R $user: /home/$user/app

USER $user

RUN mkdir /home/$user/.npm-global

WORKDIR /home/$user/app
RUN npm -g i

ENTRYPOINT ["myapp"]

Edit 2: Tried with node:8.1.0-alpine and it's working (node 8.1.0 and npm 5.0.3).

CONCLUSION : Problem is probably related to NPM 5.3.0 !

[cepiloyo]

Same issue, also with fsevents/node_modules/abbrev:
/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/lib1/node_modules/fsevents/node_modules/abbrev is not a child of /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/lib2

lib1 is sym-linked (npm link) in lib2. When the projects are not sim-linked (published internally) it works just fine.

NPM version: 5.3.0

[salim7]

Does anyone know a workaround on this?
Problem still exists with NPM version 5.4.2
Workaround: npm install --no-optional helped for now.

[eamondawes]

Thanks for the workaround @asado7, I'm also running into this issue in npm 5,4,2 with node 6.11.3

[mtomov]

Same here on linux

➜  npm --version
5.5.1
➜  nodejs --version
v6.11.4

[SanketDG]

Does anyone have a solution to this?