Why does npm ci fail?

Why does npm ci fail?

It is reporting corrupted tar files from the npm registry.

Here are some links to some failures:

• https://github.com/nodejs/node/runs/4364074731?check_suite_focus=true
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/runs/4360537144?check_suite_focus=true

Here's what a failure looks like:

Possibilities I've considered but haven't been able to reproduce:

1. Perhaps using -j2 in the workflow or something else is causing a race condition where two processes are running npm at the same time and trying to write the same tar files at about the same time, resulting in corrupted tar files.
2. Perhaps our workflows in particular or GitHub's macOS instances in general are hitting the registry hard enough that the IP or IP range is being rate-limited, resulting in failed tar downlodas.
3. Perhaps there is some bug that only occurs on macOS and/or only when npm is invoked the way it is in our tools/doc/node_modules task in the Makefile.

I think it would be nice to get input from someone at @nodejs/npm

It occurs to me that npm ci removes node_modules unconditionally so the failure may still happen anyway after the Build step. (Or maybe not because the relevant modules will be cached somewhere that npm-cli.js will find them? I was going to run the workflow a dozen times or whatever anyway to make sure it worked, so we'll probably find out if someone doesn't figure out a better way to address this issue.)

Five successful GitHub Actions runs in a row for this PR:

Not exactly conclusive, as only 1 of the 5 runs before that failed with the npm/ZDATA error. But promising so far.

Why does npm ci fail?

It is reporting corrupted tar files from the npm registry.

Here are some links to some failures:

* https://github.com/nodejs/node/runs/4364074731?check_suite_focus=true

* https://github.com/nodejs/node/runs/4360537144?check_suite_focus=true

Here's what a failure looks like:

Maybe the macOS runners have some sort of proxy in front of the registry and we're seeing npm/cli#3884? Possibly fix isaacs/minipass#28.

Five more successful runs in a row:

Landed in 781408f

@Trott I am getting this failure when building a Debian package inside of a Launchpad container - and only inside the Launchpad container - so I guess macOS is not to blame

PS No, in fact, for me npm is failing because it cannot access the registry - it is still the same error code, sorry for the noise