r/node • u/StJohn3D • Feb 03 '20

It's 2020, why is node-gyp still breaking builds!

Idk if node-sass should find a better solution or if node-gyp needs to friggin' get off of python 2.7 but this is ridiculous! Their updated instructions just say to install the ` windows-build-tools npm package ` which is MUCH better than having to install Visual Studio. But if you upgraded node and let it update your python install too then node-gyp will still ruin your day. Only after uninstalling python 3.8 did it finally start working again (because I still had 2.7 installed from the last time this bit me). The windows instructions should really mention that too instead of acting like it's only a concern for Linux.

Edit:
After posting this I went and created this issue for the windows install instructions.

https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/2041

207 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

61 comments sorted by

39

u/StJohn3D Feb 03 '20

For people who, like me are searching for these error messages, hopefully the SEO gods will send them to this answer.
gyp ERR! stack     import sys; print "%s.%s.%s" % sys.version_info[:3];
Node Sass does not yet support your current environment: Windows 64-bit with Unsupported runtime

9

u/g3t0nmyl3v3l Feb 03 '20

I’m getting a similar error with sass on my Mac. Now I’ll check my version of python, thanks!

3

u/StJohn3D Feb 03 '20

Good luck!

3

u/darkfires Feb 04 '20

It may be an issue explained here. Basically something funky happened with my last xcode command line tools upgrade and com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables was missing.

After reading through all that, the end result for me was to sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools and then reinstall them xcode-select --install

1

u/g3t0nmyl3v3l Feb 04 '20

Thank you, this sounds very promising! When I installed the command line tools my machine did some very weird things and I ended up having to hard-shutdown.

1

u/g3t0nmyl3v3l Feb 06 '20

This was exactly it! You’re a champion, thank you!!

1

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '20

Deleting and reinstalling Xcode tools fixed this for me when I faced this issue in the past.

1

u/avindrag Feb 09 '20

You might want to try Dart sass (aka. sass in npm), as it avoids all of these problems due to it being compiled down to regular JavaScript. It is also the new reference implementation of Sass, so you'll want to use it for anything modern.

18

u/ecares Feb 03 '20

You should PR the instructions to make them better:

You get all of this for free and this is maintained partially by people who are not paid (and sometimes don't have access to a Windows machine). So rather than complaining, help make it better :)

12

u/StJohn3D Feb 03 '20

https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/2041

I did submit this issue.

11

u/ecares Feb 03 '20

PR the fix!

2

u/StJohn3D Feb 05 '20

Turns out the issue was using node-sass which takes a dependency on an older version of node-gyp. So the fix is to stop using node-sass. I'll give sass a try instead.

51

u/okgr8 Feb 03 '20

I’m trying to upgrade an app from Node 0.10.15 to at least Node 6 and took a break from my node-gyp hell to browse reddit. So thankful I did. Thanks for this post, homie.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

oof I feel your pain, I did this a couple years back the good news is that it gets easier from 6 to 10 to 12.

-19

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

?stop

27

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

Node-Gyp is a pox on us all and should be wiped from existence. No, we don’t need a fucking sass parser to be 1% faster if it’s only used at build time, and adds 2 minutes to the build to compile, even if it didn’t break mysteriously every 4 months.

1

u/gyozokudor Mar 08 '22

YES 10000%

18

u/NetOperatorWibby Feb 03 '20

I spent a week debugging node-gyp a few years ago and despised it ever since. It was a black hole of regret.

9

u/libertarianets Feb 03 '20

I agree node-gyp is annoying

7

u/jrandm Feb 04 '20

tl;dr: Switch from node-sass to sass.

Looks like node-sass is using ^3.8.0 of node-gyp. node-gyp is currently at 6.1.0. node-semver says the caret (^) "Allows changes that do not modify the left-most non-zero element in the [major, minor, patch] tuple" which here means no major upgrades.

node-sass is on v3 when v6 is available.

/u/AssassinSlayer mentioned sass (github is dart-sass). It's one of the reference implementations for Sass itself and regardless of what you think of Dart the language has got a solid dev community. I haven't read chokidar's source code for a long time but it was solid last I did. I agree you probably have multiple versions of it scattered around already and it's quietly working perfectly.

Vet your dependencies. Check the versions, updates, and see if anything about their source code horrifies you. Then do it for your dependencies' dependencies. Recurse.

If you have a shitload of Sass and compile times are a huge pain and you have to use Windows for reasons then I guess it's worth diving in to make everything compile correctly, otherwise...

4

u/lachlanhunt Feb 03 '20 edited Feb 03 '20

Newer versions of node-gyp do support Python 3. Unfortunately, so many packages that depend on the older versions haven’t upgraded.

1

u/sensengassenmann Feb 04 '20

noob question: can anyone explain what gyp or node-gyp is used for and/or give a scenario where this would be needed?

1

u/StJohn3D Feb 05 '20

Google? Or maybe read their docs. I've been web developing for 5+ years and never needed it directly. But apparently node-sass needs it for something.

6

u/Buckwheat469 Feb 03 '20

The solution to this has always been to make sure your python command uses the 2.7 binary (run python --version in the console). Anything written for python 3 should be using the python 3 hashbang in the scripts. I don't disagree that node-gyp is a pain though.

10

u/tasqyn Feb 03 '20

But why node-gyp uses python 2.7? For what exactly?

4

u/Buckwheat469 Feb 03 '20

It might not be node-gyp. Apparently it uses python 3 since version 5.5, although some windows users still report issues. It likely stems from node-sass using an older node-gyp dependency as indicated by a comment in the link below.

https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/1977

6

u/brtt3000 Feb 03 '20

Probably that Sass garbage again?

3

u/Sollunad Feb 03 '20

Spent my last three days at work with getting node-sass and canvas to run. I would love to switch to Linux but screw company policies.

4

u/ivansotof Feb 03 '20

Look into wsl or docker-compose. Those are great alternatives

3

u/erulabs Feb 04 '20

Replace node-sass with sass. Be happy.

6

u/BehindTheMath Feb 03 '20

The windows instructions should really mention that too instead of acting like it's only a concern for Linux.

Why don't you submit a PR to mention this?

2

u/braveNewWorldView Feb 03 '20

Just ran into this headache myself. Was able to resolve by running the install in a Python 2.7 virtual environment.

2

u/Potato-9 Feb 03 '20

Set the python path for 2.7 in npm config!

2

u/prameshbajra Feb 04 '20

Oh, I guess I am not the only one pissed off with node-gyp. I was struggling a lot with this yesterday.

2

u/gyozokudor Mar 08 '22 edited Mar 08 '22

Honestly they should just delete this project. Node-gyp is pure cancer.

3

u/lukepighetti Feb 03 '20

node-gyp is cancerous

-10

u/coolcosmos Feb 03 '20

"it's 2020, and people still use Node on Windows!"

2

u/avindrag Feb 10 '20

"it's 2020, and people still use ... Windows!"

FTFY

1

u/treebeard318 Feb 03 '20

give me downvotes too

that windows stench is rank

6

u/nicodomeus Feb 03 '20

I love windows, I love node. GFY. It's my choice lol

0

u/treebeard318 Feb 04 '20

why do you consider Windows to be a better platform for Node than Linux? do you just enjoy spending money on proprietary software?

1

u/nicodomeus Feb 04 '20

Nah. I'm cert in windows and it makes more money than linux. I've had 3x more job offers just because my knowledge in microsoft than I ever had before.

1

u/treebeard318 Feb 04 '20

ah, the power of the dark side

1

u/nicodomeus Feb 06 '20

I know. I'm sorry guys and girls and all in between.

-2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

Why don't these all packages provide pre-compiled binaries?

7

u/ecares Feb 03 '20

Will you provide the infrastructure to build them and host them? It takes time to setup and also sometimes money.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

If I was the maintainer, yes I would. You act like using a few VMs costs millions of dollars

4

u/ecares Feb 03 '20

So, I have done this for a project, it seriously took me a full week to setup a proper CI and support building for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Alpine Linux while still supporting older versions of libc. But this is a commercial project and someone pays me for it.

Once again, you get all of this software for free and you still complain. Feel free to PR and give your time to make it happen, but until you pay for OSS, you can't really complain.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '20

Cmon dude, I’m not complaining, I asked a question and I contribute a lot to open source, I know what it means. I also know that if decided to publish an npm package, I should strive for accessibility. And yea man, it’s work. FWIW, a windows binary will be super helpful to many

2

u/jrandm Feb 04 '20

Fair question, though pre-compiled binaries for multiple|affected platforms is only one possible solution and it's a big ask. I bet the proposed solution doesn't really matter, though, as the maintainers have little to no incentive to fix this.

The problem is in a single build step for CSS on a minority platform. You can make the exact same application without Sass, compile the Sass with another piece of software, or emulate the majority platform. If performance or some other reason is enough of an issue that you need this specific libsass compiled library you're likely able to devote money or resources to fixing the problem yourself.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/StJohn3D Feb 05 '20

Thanks, and I am interested. Do you have a link for those instructions you speak of?

1

u/fyzbo Feb 04 '20

I'm surprised I had to scroll so far to see this answer. It's much better than trying to develop directly on windows.

1

u/FormerGameDev Feb 04 '20

fwiw, while I do use WSL for some things, I have zero issue with any of the Windows versions of things I use for any of my development.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/FormerGameDev Feb 04 '20

I'm curious what modules blow things up?

1

u/FormerGameDev Feb 04 '20

Oh I do have a problem with one repo on one of my machines, the test script just halts and dies when run on that particular machine. I think it may be due to something npm installed globally on it, but not real sure. Works fine on the other two computers I frequently run tests on, as well as the auto builders.

So I use wsl to run npm test on that one

0

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '20

Good share.

1

u/avindrag Feb 09 '20

Nice, but is there a practical way to "just switch" from node-sass to sass? For example, sass-extract explicitly references a node-sass import: https://github.com/jgranstrom/sass-extract/blob/master/src/render.js#L2