George's Learning Journal

    11-02-2022-Failing-Builds

    Figuring Out The Weird Return

    Project

    Work Project

    Date

    11/02/2022

    Technology

    • JavaScript
    • Node
    • NPM

    The Problem

    The build for the project I was working on failed, and it didn’t make sense to me since the changes had been deployed.

    I was trying to get dates that were being randomly generated to land on one specific day of the month.

    The Process

    • After making my changes, I looked at the GitHub logs and saw that it had one output before failing, which was just Error: Build status: FAILED.
    • So I jumped into the app to see if the dates were still random.
      • They were not; they were all defaulting to the first of the month
      • So it looked like my change was still deployed despite the fail message
    • I jumped into the tech channel in slack to ask if there were any other logging resources I could look into to get more information.
    • I got some information about the GitHub Action that we use for triggering deploys. It dumps the logs from AWS Codebuild into the GitHub Actions log output. So what I was seeing was mostly what I was going to get.
    • I also learned from chatting with people that AWS Codebuild uses a buildspec.yml file to tell Codebuild what to do.
    • After this, I tried logging into AWS to see if I could see what was happening.
    • So I went to our project and looked at the logs, and was able to see something a little more descriptive and noticed that the build deployed the API correctly but failed at the frontend build.
      • The message was a similar one I had seen when doing the same thing locally before I was set up with NPM and AWS, so it’s possible that is related.

    Solution

    Turns out the project had a long outdated package-lock.json file that was being used when building the project. The project was a few months old by the time I had gotten to it, and I was able to clear up the issue by generating a new package-lock.json file and uploaded that to the repo. Once all the updates were working the project was able to build.

    #ProblemSolving