0

I have a nodejs-based project running on my Ubuntu server, using the usual node_modules folder of dependencies. Some of them where (eg. "ws" in this case) where automatically compiled using node-gyp on install by npm install, and everything was fine for some months.

However I now just encountered a case where automatic security updates (apt unattended-upgrades on Linux) removed dynamically linked dependencies (a certain version of libc, eg. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.X.Y.so) of the application, as the deprecated lib was removed from the system by APT. Which is perfectly fine on APTs behalf, as no other APT-managed package depend on it anymore.

Doing a "rebuild" by npm rebuild is fixing this problem (by invoking node-gyp to build against the new version of the libraries I guess).

How to build my application in a way that this does not happen again? Is there any way I can tell npm to output the dependencies node-gyp used to compile against?

Improve this question
3
  • What does ldd print as the exact dependency in this case? Not familiar with ws, but at a glance seems like some other package brings the faster C implementation. glibc has been on so version 6 forever, and maintains forward compatibility with symbols. Commented Jul 11 at 12:39
  • Thing is, if I found those dependencies manually, for one module, how to handle that? Should I read every code change for every apt package updates (including automated security ones)? A more general solution is needed, otherwise I will have an occasionally failing system with no warning before. Commented Aug 16 at 9:20
  • Before I attempt a general answer I wish to understand your specific problem. Please provide the linker output when building a node-gyp package that has this problem. And readelf --dyn-syms or similar on the native library to show what it links to. glibc specifically has been on file libc.so.6 for many years with backwards compatibility, the only problem I can imagine is trying to use very new libc features. Commented Aug 16 at 23:28

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.