"cd" was removed in GAE Standard Node.js and broke our app

[david....@hgv.it]

At 2018-10-27 04:17:46.164 MESZ our GAE Standard App restarted.

After the restart CD was not available anymore and our app failed to start since we rely on it when starting the server.

package.json

{

  ...,

  "scripts": {

    "start": "cd api && node -r ./ts-paths.js dist/api/src/server.js"

  }

}

Was this change intended?

[Jorge A (Google Cloud Support)]

What is the error message you're getting? Also, what runtime are you using? And how do you know CD isn't available anymore, is that part of the error message?

[david....@hgv.it]

The error message is 

/bin/sh: 1: exec: cd: not found

We use the Node.js Standard Environment.

[Jorge A (Google Cloud Support)]

The fact that it isn't found means that there was a change to the path between last successful deploy and now. Please check if there's any other process like a cloud task or another script changing path on deploy or before deploy.

[david....@hgv.it]

The start command above was the only script changing path we used. For now we solved it by removing the cd command altogether by restructuring our folders.

{

 ...,

 "scripts": {

   "start": "node -r ./ts-paths.js dist/src/server.js"

 }

}

I checked the available system packages in the documentation and noticed cd is not part of them.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/nodejs/reference/system-packages

Could it  be never officially supported and got removed altogether on the day our app broke?

[Amit (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello David

Glad to know that you resolved the issue. From my research, I didn’t find any evidence / documentation that lead us to believe that cd’ was officially supported before. As mentioned in the documentation you referred, you can find the current supported packages in this link as well as you can request to include new packages from this issue tracker link if there is no existing request for that.