Deploying to heroku - sensitivity to correct node module versions

[Jeff Mason]

All,

I just moved an existing application to Phoenix 1.3 and re-deployed to Heroku. I found the deployment was very sensitive to node module versions so I wanted to post here for anyone running in to similar issues.

Heroku was choosing:

Erlang 19.3

Elixir 1.4.2

node v6.9.2

npm v3.10.9

I also included .elixir_buildpack.config with a "always_rebuild=true" flag and .phoenix_static_buildpack.config with a "clean_cache=true" flag to try to ensure that heroku was building from scratch on each deploy.

Everything was fine locally, but here are some of the errors I saw on deployment. I believe these are all related to Brunch and npm:

1.) remote:        Brunch: Local install exists, but failed to load it. Continuing with global install: { Error: Cannot find module './utils/error'

remote:        at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:469:15)

remote:        at Function.Module._load (module.js:417:25)

remote:        at Module.require (module.js:497:17)

remote:        at require (internal/module.js:20:19)

remote:        at Object.<anonymous> (/tmp/build_844e9bf7da5aa826f2f4f7588e7b1bd8/assets/node_modules/brunch/lib/index.js:5:21)

remote:        at Module._compile (module.js:570:32)

remote:        at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:579:10)

remote:        at Module.load (module.js:487:32)

remote:        at tryModuleLoad (module.js:446:12)

remote:        at Function.Module._load (module.js:438:3) code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND' }

remote:        module.js:471

remote:        throw err;

remote:        ^

remote:        

remote:        Error: Cannot find module './utils/error'

1.) Solution - I believe this was fixed by bumping the brunch version from 2.10.5 to 2.10.7

2.) remote: npm ERR! Linux 3.13.0-112-generic

remote:        npm ERR! argv "/tmp/build_9fda396d33d7e578b6aad5626a7f44dc/.heroku/node/bin/node" "/tmp/build_9fda396d33d7e578b6aad5626a7f44dc/.heroku/node/bin/npm" "rebuild"

remote:        npm ERR! node v6.9.2

remote:        npm ERR! npm  v3.10.9

remote:        npm ERR! path /tmp/build_9fda396d33d7e578b6aad5626a7f44dc/assets/node_modules/clean-css/bin/cleancss

remote:        npm ERR! code ENOENT

remote:        npm ERR! errno -2

remote:        npm ERR! syscall chmod

remote:        

remote:        npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/tmp/build_9fda396d33d7e578b6aad5626a7f44dc/assets/node_modules/clean-css/bin/cleancss

2.) Solution - I believe this was fixed by bumping the clean-css-brunch version to 2.10.0

Overall - here's the package.json that worked for me with Sass (phoenix 1.3, so its /assets/package.json)

{

  "repository": {},

  "license": "MIT",

  "scripts": {

    "deploy": "brunch build --production",

    "watch": "brunch watch --stdin"

  },

  "dependencies": {

    "phoenix": "file:../deps/phoenix",

    "phoenix_html": "file:../deps/phoenix_html"

  },

  "devDependencies": {

    "babel-brunch": "6.0.6",

    "brunch": "2.10.7",

    "clean-css-brunch": "2.10.0",

    "uglify-js-brunch": "2.10.0",

    "sass-brunch": "^2.10.4"

  }

}

Hope this helps someone!

Jeff