Error during install: "websocket Appears to be a git repo or submodule"

[spalladino]

Creating a new issue based on @crazyrabbitLTC's #926.

When running Node v10.16.0 this error was appearing on installs of ZOS and Truffle.

Dennisons-MacBook-Pro:my-project dennison$ npm install zos
npm ERR! path /Users/dennison/Documents/my-project/node_modules/websocket
npm ERR! code EISGIT
npm ERR! git /Users/dennison/Documents/my-project/node_modules/websocket: Appears to be a git repo or submodule.
npm ERR! git     /Users/dennison/Documents/my-project/node_modules/websocket
npm ERR! git Refusing to remove it. Update manually,
npm ERR! git or move it out of the way first.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/dennison/.npm/_logs/2019-05-31T18_56_24_258Z-debug.log

This is an error that @nventuro told me happens to him also frequently and that the only solution appears to be running rm -rf node_modules and then doing npm install again.

I have not been able to reproduce this on a fresh install in node 10.16. Based on the message, it would seem like you already had something in your node_modules folder. Can you identify the steps you need to run on an empty folder to get to that error?

By the way, it would seem like running just rm -rf node_modules/*/.git/ (see this comment) fixes the issue. It should be a faster workaround than clearing all of node_modules.

[frangio]

I can reproduce this error by simply running the following command in an empty directory.

npm install github:frozeman/WebSocket-Node.git#browserifyCompatible

This is the same dependency that is causing the error. Running the command will create the node_modules/websocket/.git directory, which causes that trying to run the command once more will fail with the EISGIT error.

This is npm's fault as far as I can tell. However, I believe that the package/repo would be able to mitigate this if it specified "files" in package.json, or .npmignored the .git directory.

I am using node 11.15.0 and npm 6.9.0.

[frangio]

Official comment by the web3.js maintainer on this situation: web3/web3.js#2863 (comment).

[frangio]

I would not recommend rm -rf node_modules/*/.git/. If there's a local dependency installed there will be a symlink and its .git directory would be removed.

[spalladino]

Thanks @frangio, we will wait on web3 for the fix then

[itinance]

The issue on web3 (web3/web3.js#2863 (comment)) was already closed, but obviously no new release was finished yet. It breaks circle-ci as well

[spalladino]

Fixed as web3 was upgraded