Random Errors

Posted: April 3, 2023 | Categories: Eleventy

I am in the process of migrating my existing johnwargo.com site hosted on FatCow to Eleventy hosted on Netlify and while I work on the site, I setup my jmw-test.com domain so it points to the work in progress site.

When I setup the site and build in Netlify yesterday, the site built and deployed for me the first time, but then quit working and gave me the following error:

9:00:51 AM: $ eleventy
9:00:52 AM: bash: eleventy: command not found
9:00:52 AM: ​
9:00:52 AM:   "build.command" failed                                        
9:00:52 AM: ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
9:00:52 AM: ​
9:00:52 AM:   Error message
9:00:52 AM:   Command failed with exit code 127: eleventy (https://ntl.fyi/exit-code-127)
9:00:52 AM: ​
9:00:52 AM:   Error location
9:00:52 AM:   In Build command from Netlify app:
9:00:52 AM:   eleventy
9:00:52 AM: ​
9:00:52 AM:   Resolved config
9:00:52 AM:   build:
9:00:53 AM: Failed during stage 'building site': Build script returned non-zero exit code: 2 (https://ntl.fyi/exit-code-2)
9:00:52 AM:     command: eleventy
9:00:52 AM:     commandOrigin: ui
9:00:52 AM:     environment:
9:00:52 AM:       - NODE_ENV
9:00:52 AM:     publish: /opt/build/repo/_site
9:00:52 AM:     publishOrigin: ui

I ran the build all day on my local system with no errors, so this really perplexed me. I poked and prodded at the Netlify docs, but couldn't find a solution that worked. As I prepared to jump on the Netlify community site to ask for help, I opened the build log to copy the error text displayed above and found the reason for the build failure:

9:00:42 AM: WARNING: The environment variable 'NODE_ENV' is set to 'production'. Any 'devDependencies' in package.json will not be installed

Being an experienced Node/JavaScript developer, I knew to install my dev dependencies in the project's package.json file under devDependencies and that worked just fine on my local system. That is a flawed premise though, Eleventy is a static site generator, so runtime for an Eleventy project is during the build process, not while the 'app' executes.

I quickly moved the devDependencies to dependencies and the project built and deployed as expected.

This site uses Netlify as well and it only took me a few seconds to realize why this issue hit me now rather than when I built this site. I was playing around with HTML minification in Eleventy projects based on the Minifying HTML Output tutorial and during implementation I added a NODE_ENV environment variable in Netlify to enable HTML minification for production use (rather than having it enabled all the time) and that triggered Netlify to ignore my devDependencies.

Problem solved!