Yarn

[ghost]

Is anyone using this module with yarn? I recently had to do some troubleshooting which involved wiping out my node_modules and daemon folders to start fresh (I made the mistake of not uninstalling the service first which was a bit of headache).

Now I can't get the module to reliably start/stop in my deploy script.

I ran npm install -g node-windows then npm link node-windows inside the project root as described in the README, service.js is defined at the project root with the installDir as __dirname and script at server/dist/index, but for some reason it keeps installing everything in my server/dist folder where the start script for my server is defined.

I almost feel like I need to link node-windows every time too, but this could just be happenstance. If I stop/start, sometimes I get "Error: cannot find module "node-windows"". Then I have to link to get it to recognize node-windows again, at which point it can't find the service it just stopped and I have to reinstall again, which it will happily do and start up. As you can imagine, this process is not very deploy script friendly and frustrating.

Something tells me this has more to do with yarn and npm fighting. Annoyingly enough, yarn doesn't have a global install option like npm anymore so that sucks.

[coreybutler]

This library wasn't written with yarn in mind, but I know there are users who successfully use it with yarn. I can't think of anything npm-specific in the code base.

This issue may be due to the use of __dirname though... if you're actually using that variable to define a path. When the application runs, __dirname refers to the root of the current application. If I correctly understand your setup, this would be the node-windows directory, not a code directory. I recommend hard-coding paths to test whether your deploy script is properly generating the appropriate paths.

In case it's helpful, the wiki has several answers/comments about using __dirname.

[ghost]

Thank you for the quick response! I'll look into that and see if that's maybe to do with it. My only concern is we've been using this build script for quite some time now and if all it took to break it was resetting the node_modules...

[coreybutler]

If it's not a path issue, it would make sense to me that nuking/replacing node_modules could cause this. For example, if the package.json file contains dependencies like "some_module": "^1.0.0", then any module over 1.0.0 would be installed. Fast forward quite some time and many dependency modules may be updated. For example, some_module v2.0.0 may be released with breaking changes or different functionality. That could break a script.

[ghost]

That is true. Tho the first part of the build script runs yarn and our yarn.lock is checked into the project. Another place to look though. Thank you 👍