npm VS config

The fact that JSON doesn't support comments is so annoying, and I always thought that Douglas Crockford's rationale for this basically made no sense ("They can be misused!" - like, so what, nearly anything can be misused. So without support for comments e.g. in package.json files I have to do even worse hacky workaround bullshit like "__some_field_comment": "this is my comment"). There is of course jsonc and JSON5 but the fact that it's not supported everywhere means 10 years later we still can't write comments in package.json (there is https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 and about a million related issues).

Things like the sparkline charts on npmjs (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm ) are interactive SVGs. I think they're pretty common for data visualizations of all kinds

I actually did a POC 7 years ago about this - https://github.com/tanepiper/steal-ur-stuff

It was reported to npm at the time, but they chose to ignore it - https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17724

Every time this pops up, I'm reminded of the day that the NPM registry started returning 418 responses.

I remember being at a training course that day and my manager asking me what we could do to fix it because our CI was failing to pull dependencies from NPM.

Trying to explain that NPM was returning a status code intended as an April Fools joke and which was never meant to see the light of production was quite difficult

https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20791

I should really get around to how I discovered this 6 years ago and still nothing done about it

Whenever something like this comes up I usually have to tap the sign (and the original report)

NPM is not "Node Package Manager". https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm

> which can be overriden with env setting

Support for this is not great. Lots of packages still don't support this properly. My experience matches the 2015 comment https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/775#issuecomment-71294085

> Not sure why "symlinks" would be involved.

If you make your node_modules a symlink, multiple packages will fail. Even if you're not interested in doing that, others are.

> What NPM does is leaps and bounds ahead

Unless you change your node / gyp version. It doesn't really have a concept of runtime version. You can restrict it, but not have two concurrent versions if they conflict.

[email protected] was released in May 2017 and it seems to address many of the issues that Yarn aims to solve. Do keep an eye on it!

I think it's had been supposed to do that since forever. Apart from some bug in npm 5.3. Are you sure your package-lock versions actually conform to the semver ranges in your package.json?

I don‘t understand why HOCON (https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md) isn‘t used more often (at least for configuration use cases). It‘s a superset of JSON, has comments, multiline strings, optional quotes, replacement syntax. We use it at many places, and it‘s as nice at it can get.

HOCON is a great human-readable alternative to JSON. It's a superset of JSON with lots of cool features that make it both more readable and easier to use.

Here's a rundown of HOCON's main features: https://github.com/lightbend/config#features-of-hocon

"Typesafe Config" is the library generally used to read configuration files in HOCON format, which this library introduced. It's commonly used in essentially OOP/imperative Scala contexts, including Akka and its ecosystem.

Interesting!

For my own servers I use an internal tool that integrates apps with systemd. You point it at the output of your build system and a config file, and it produces a deb that contains systemd unit files and which registers/starts the server on install/reboot/upgrade, as a regular debian package would. Then it uploads it to the server via sftp and installs it using apt, so dependencies are resolved. As part of the build process it can download and bundle language runtimes (I use it with a JVM), it scans native binaries to find packages that the app should depend on, and you can define your config including package metadata like dependencies and systemd units using the HOCON language [1].

Upshot is you can go from a Gradle or Maven build to a running server with a few lines of config. Oh and it can build debs from any OS, so you can push from macOS and Windows too. If your server needs to depend on e.g. Postgres, you just add that dependency in your config and it'll be up and running after the push.

It also has features to turn on DynamicUser and other sandboxing features. I think I'll experiment with socket activation next, and then bundled BorgBackup.

Net/net it's pretty nice. I haven't tried with containers because many language ecosystems don't seem to really need them for many use cases. If your build tool knows how to download your language runtime and bundle it sans container by just setting up paths correctly, then going without means you can rely on your Linux distribution to keep things up to date with security patches in the background, it means networking works as you'd expect (no accidentally opened firewall ports!) and so on. SystemD knows how to configure resource isolation/cgroups and kernel sandboxing, so if you need those you can just write that into your build config and it's done. Or not, as you wish.

With a deployment tool to automate builds/pushes, systemd to supervise processes and a big beefy dedicated machine to let you scale up, I wonder how much value the container part is really still providing if you don't need the full functionality of Kubernetes.

[1] https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md

Other similar standards: TOML, HOCON

I've also used HOCON pretty extensively for config, and it is better than both YAML and JSON for config with moderate to high complexity.