Unhandled error in Jenkins pipeline

[bandantonio]

I'm receiving the following error when trying to use retype in my ci/cd system:

+ npm run build

> docs@0.0.1 build /home/jenkins/workspace/docs_master
> retype build

events.js:187
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

package.json:

{
  "name": "docs",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "serve": "retype watch",
    "build": "retype build"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "retypeapp": "^1.5.0"
  }
}

Jenkins:

stage("Build") {
        docker.image("ci/nodejs:1.0").inside {
            sh "npm i"
            sh "npm run build"
        }
        publishHTML(target: [
            allowMissing: false,
            keepAll     : true,
            reportDir   : "${docsFolderName}",
            reportFiles : "index.html",
            reportName  : "Documentation"
        ])
    }

[fabriciomurta]

Hello, can you add --verbose to the retype commands?

retype build --verbose

The error you are getting is not really giving any clue on what might have gone wrong.

[geoffreymcgill]

Is retype installed on the Jenkins container?

Maybe adding the sh "npm install retypeapp --global" config is required. I'm not super familiar with Jenkins, so maybe this is just a stab in dark.

        docker.image("ci/nodejs:1.0").inside {
            sh "npm i"
            sh "npm run build"
            sh "npm install retypeapp --global"
        }

[fabriciomurta]

ENOENT is exactly "no such file or directory".

Per the error message it looks like jenkins wants to find retype at that location but can't find it. And per the path, it really looks like it was an npm install without --global.

You may remove retype from devDependencies in package.json as well (using geoffrey's extra line to install it as a global tool); installing it as a local module -and- global one would just spend extra time.

[fabriciomurta]

Just out of curiosity, I experimented with your exact package.json in an empty directory here; a npm i installed retype at the local folder and I could run it if I used the path similar to jenkins pipeline tried.

In my case, I used node_modules/retypeapp/platforms/win-x64/retype --version (for I am running windows OS), and it worked.

In your case, the file not being there, where the path makes sense, is still a mystery; my local install also included the linux-x64/retype binary, which suggests something prevented the pipeline from fully installing retype package. The standalone NPM package takes up to 243MB in disk space, could that be the reason your pipeline didn't allow the package files in?

In case jenkins comes with the dotnet CLI preinstalled, you can save a lot of required space and download if you remove the dependency from package.json and use dotnet tool install --global retypeapp instead.

[geoffreymcgill]

@bandantonio Were you able to get Retype working with Jenkins? Let us know if you require any further assistance and we will investigate.

[bandantonio]

Hi @geoffreymcgill
Sorry for my super long reply - no, I wasn't able to get Retype working with Jenkins. I was in a hurry at that time (I was on a hackathon) and I didn't have much time to investigate the root cause but I'm 90% sure that I did something wrong.

I will try to investigate the installation process in Jenkins step-by-step a bit later and I will share my observations with you afterward.

[Genzer]

Hi @bandantonio,

I encountered the same problem and I had found a solution to this.

Basically, Retype is not a pure Node.JS package. Its core is implemented using .NET and the retypeapp NPM package is just a simple CLI wrapper to the binary (you can explore this by going to node_modules/retypeapp/platforms/.

Using a single nodejs Docker image alone won't work as it lacks system libraries (Retype binary is a dynamically-linked executable). I managed to analyzed and developed a Dockerfile which could use Retype on Docker. Please have a look at https://gist.github.com/Genzer/22c40a2e3d65e13c81903e3dd6874c42.

[fabriciomurta]

Thanks Genzer for taking your time to beat the mystery out of this bag! So in the end it was just some solibs that .NET require and the image didn't include! Even though we tried our best to include all dependencies in the package, we could only go as far as .NET goes.

For the record, the missing system libraries/packages were libgssapi-krb5-2 and libssl-dev.