How to modify the behavior of the initializing step? Like preventing `npm install`

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  • site name: pyth-on-line.netlify.app
  • build logs: Netlify App

Most of modern JavaScript package managers suppress peerdependencies warnings, but npm does not.

The behavior of npm is weird:

  1. The first time it will warn user about peerDependencies
  2. If a node_modules exists, it will throw peerDependencies as errors

So everytime I deploy with cache, it fails for peerDependencies. But if I deploy without cache, it successes.

I don’t like locking the package manager in package.json and don’t want to upload a lock file either. So I can’t set the package manager to replace npm manually.

I think there are several ways to resolve this common use case:

  1. support setting package manager through env / in netlify.toml / in the build settings UI
  2. support setting install command that automatically runes during Initializing step
  3. support to opt-out some commands in Initializing step
  4. support to opt-out caching of build
  5. support custom cleanup commands (so that I may remove node_modules)

Any approach from the above can resolve this.

2

@muspi-merol It may not be applicable for your situation, (and doesn’t align with your wider configuration requests), but have you considered trying the legacy-peer-deps flag?

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/using-npm/config#legacy-peer-deps

It can be applied with the NPM_FLAGS environment variable, for which there is more detail here:

https://answers.netlify.com/t/deploy-failed-today-build-was-terminated-build-script-returned-non-zero-exit-code-1/64450/2

With #5, if you did want to delete your node_modules you could just do so within your build command, as the node_modules won’t be in your Publish directory they could be safely deleted after build but prior to deployment.

1 Like
3

Thank you a lot! Setting NPM_FLAGS did resolve my problem. Apologize for having not read through documents for the npm cli.

About #5, I found that some of my netlify functions relies on the node_modules so I can’t remove it in the build command. But excluding it in the build cache may be useful.

4

You can also specify NPM_FLAGS as --dry-run to prevent installing anything from NPM.

5

Thanks. Yes it works