NPM dependencies fail to load

[rdickert]

Not positive this is a Meteorite issue, so just close this if not, but I thought I'd post an issue here for something that seems to happen across multiple Meteorite packages for certain users at certain times. Perhaps there is a common thread. For examples of this problem, see these issues:

• Iron Router
• NPM
• SCSS

They all involve a bunch of npm dependency errors followed by error: couldn't read npm version lock information (there are full traces in the issues above). The solution seems to always be to delete some older version of the module and reload from scratch. In my case, I had to delete ~/node_modules, which struck me as odd – I was under the impression that neither Meteor nor Meteorite packages should search more global paths (that directory is not in my $PATH, either). From that, I get the idea that Meteorite(NPM?) is in rare cases becoming confused about paths when installing dependencies, but that's about as far as I've gotten. I solved my own issue, but I thought I'd put a "meta-issue" here in hopes the problem can be identified and solved.

[rdickert]

A quick followup to this: After getting my project working again, I decided to upgrade Meteor for this project from 0.6.x…and it failed again, same error, this time for both iron-router and meteor-scss. Once again, renaming ~/node_modules and running meteor allowed it to update and start running again.

So I may have found a way to replicate this:

• put a directory called node_modules in your home directory.
• make or update an app (may require a new version of Meteor).
• mrt add scss or mrt add iron-router

Anyway, it seems to work that way on my machine (OSX 10.9.1). Is Meteorite or NPM (or Meteor itself) hunting up the directory tree for a node_modules directory?

[tmeasday]

@rdickert can you reproduce the problem without Meteorite being involved?

I.e. create a new project, manually install IR into packages/, do whatever it is that causes the problem.

[rdickert]

@tmeasday Yes, it looks like I can. If I do a meteor create, add a packages directory and clone in the scss package, meteor add meteor-scss fails if ~/node_modules is present but works when I remove it. Let me know if you have any further comments, but I don't think this is your issue. Looks like maybe a weird edge case in Meteor itself. Let me know if you disagree, but I think I'll file this on the Meteor project. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.