spago installed via npm does not seem to fully install

[bbarker]

brandon@c9460f72c9e4:/wd$ type -a spago
spago is /usr/local/bin/spago
brandon@c9460f72c9e4:/wd$ cat /usr/local/bin/spago
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e

echo "This is a stub that will be replaced on install. \
It is needed to workaround https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3421"

I have a container for this that reproduces the issue: 305e449d39b9a146f5bfca1f335a80cd2c2bebe0 at https://github.com/bbarker/purescript-hodgepodge, or just use master's HEAD for now.

To run the container, use psc.sh in the repo, or a modified version that has fewer mounts, though I'm not sure what the behavior will be (should be mostly fine though). To build the container, you can run build.socker.sh.

[f-f]

Thanks for the report @bbarker!

Some notes:

1. I'd recommend downloading spago in the same way you're downloading the purs and psc-package binaries in the container, as that's much more reliable than npm
2. I'm able to reproduce just trying to install spago on a bare node image, I'll investigate more on this:

$ docker-bash node:12
root@71c1f9e95b14:/# npm install -g spago

> [email protected] preinstall /usr/local/lib/node_modules/spago
> node ./install.js

/usr/local/bin/spago -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/spago/spago.exe
+ [email protected]
added 29 packages from 19 contributors in 4.809s
root@71c1f9e95b14:/# spago -v
This is a stub that will be replaced on install. It is needed to workaround https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3421
root@71c1f9e95b14:/#

[f-f]

Found it. TL;DR: you need to use --unsafe-perm as an npm option if you want to install packages as root and have them to work, or just set a user in your Dockerfile. See this medium post or this StackOverflow question for more info.

So running this command in the container works correctly: npm install -g --unsafe-perm spago

I feel this "installing npm packages as root" might be a common problem, so we should definitely add to the FAQ something along the lines of "DON'T RUN NPM AS ROOT"

[JordanMartinez]

I don't know the full context of this issue (so my apologies if this isn't helpful), but isn't this a symptom of not configuring the npm prefix to a directory that doesn't require root privileges? Otherwise, one has to run node with root privileges to get anything to work.

…

[f-f]

@JordanMartinez what happens here is that Docker by default runs all commands as root (unless you specify otherwise), combined with the fact that npm installs binaries as nobody when root. See the links in my previous comment, or this issue: npm/npm#3849

The result is that installing spago with npm running as root will never work, unless --unsafe-perm is specified

[JordanMartinez]

@f-f Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying that for me.

[f-f]

@JordanMartinez you're welcome! 🙂