I recently upgraded our servers and frontend app builds to run on Node 14 and npm@7 and ran into several interesting things that are worth documenting.

I used volta across projects. This was extremely helpful because I was running npm install and npm ci quite a bit for testing and, before using volta pin, about half the time I had the wrong version of Node or npm was active, changing package-lock.json, and possibly the structure of node_modules/.

Although npm@7 generates an entirely different package-lock.json (indicated by the "lockfileVersion": "2" key), I realized that:

• npm@6 can run npm ci with a v2 package-lock.json
• npm@7 can run npm ci with a v1 package-lock.json

This was nice to know, but without Volta installed and socialized to the rest of the team, I was worried that depending on these two unhappy paths could result in non-deterministic node_modules/ directories, causing a lot of confusion and red herrings if any bugs came up.

During this upgrade, I ran into a few relatively minor issues that I spent some time chasing down that I felt were worth sharing.

Username and password authentication

Authenticating with username and password to private registries doesn't work past v7.10.0. There's an issue open that looks similar, but I am not 100% sure if it accurately describes our issue. volta pin npm@7.10.0 works for now.

Node Sass

I didn't figure out exactly what was going on, but in our CI system, our app build would throw complaining that node_moduless/node-sass/vendor wasn't available. This only reproduced in projects that installed node-sass as a top level dependency.

node-sass@4.14 has a postinstall script that runs a custom script: node scripts/build.js. I found that if I ran npm rebuild node-sass in my project's postinstall script, it fixed the issue. The only difference I see is that npm rebuild (which, under the hood simply runs node-sass's build script), runs node scripts/build.js --force. I didn't go further down this rabbit hole, but my latest hunch is that our CI system was somehow caching the node_modules/ directory (or some other directory where node-sass is built), and the --force command cleared it? This doesn't quite satisfy me for a few reasons:

• I tried clearing the CI system's cache to no avail
• I heard from others that they had issues with npm@7 not running postinstall scripts at all (which I was not able to reproduce locally at least).
• I wasn't able to reproduce the missing vendor directory at all locally.

I think the answer is in some combination of these observations, but 🤷🏽.

npm outdated

We use npm outdated --json to make automated pull requests to update dependencies. In npm@6 this command has an exit code 1 if there are outdated dependencies. This was a bit odd to me, but I know @izs has a strong Unix background and has designed the npm CLI very intentionally. If I squint, it almost makes sense that having outdated dependencies is considered a "failure" exit code, so I didn't question it for too long. I just wrote my code to handle the oddity:

function getOutdatedModules() {
    let out = "{}";
    try {
        runCommand("npm outdated --json");
    } catch (e) {
        // `npm outdated --json` returns non-zero exit
        // which means runCommand() will throw and the information
        // will be in the throw error's stdout.
        out = e.stdout.toString();
    }
    return JSON.parse(out);
}

In npm@7, the exit code changed to 0, which meant that my function always returned an empty object.

--progress

I noticed that in our CI system, npm ci output got a lot noisier and included colors and progress indicators. I know this happens when CLI's try to show progress in non-interactive terminals, so I looked up the progress config to see what was going on. I couldn't chase down the code difference, but the docs had been updated from v6 to v7.

- "Default: true, unless TRAVIS or CI env vars set."
+ Default: true unless running in a known CI system

Our CI sets a CI=true environment variable, so my hunch is that the heuristics for determining CI removed this signal. I was able to fix the logs by changing our command to npm ci --no-progress. This is also backwards compatible with npm@6, because it's a more deterministic way of getting the same behavior we already had.

ERR_SOCKET_TIMEOUT

After upgrading to npm@7, I noticed that every few CI runs errored out with ERR_SOCKET_TIMEOUT on some non-deterministic package. I found an issue that mentions this error code, and points me to the fact that it's a network error related to agentkeepalive. Fingers crossed this one is really just bad timing from my CI's network connectivity while I was doing this work and will go away on its own.

Edit: I'm not the only one that ran into this.