Following Contributing docs fails locally

[elierotenberg]

Environment details

• OS: Windows 10
• Node.js version: 13.10.1
• npm version: 6.13.7
• googleapis version: 60.0.1

Steps to reproduce

1. Checkout repository
2. npm run samples-test, npm run system-test (without prior npm run fix).

Working on a PR, I checkout out the repo and followed the CONTRIBUTING instructions.

I ran across several issues, similar to those encountered in nodejs-googleapis-common.

Not Windows-related

The following dependencies were already in the samples package.json but caused npm run samples test to fail:

• @google-cloud/local-auth,
• nconf,
• express.

This is because the samples subpackage isn't installed. It is installed as a side effect of npm run prelint which may hide the problem, e.g. if prelint has run at least once.

Running npm install from the samples subdir solved it.

Windows related

The following error is raised when running npm run samples-test on Windows:

  1) Auth samples
       should support JWT:
     Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, symlink
         'XXXXXX\google-api-nodejs-client\test\fixtures\service.json' ->
         'XXXXXX\google-api-nodejs-client\samples\jwt.keys.json'

This is likely because fs.symlinkSync doesn't work properly on Windows on files (altough it works with directories using junction type) or requires privilege elevation.

As a workaround, copying the file instead of symlinking it solved it.

Authentication related

The problems described in this issue also apply.

[bcoe]

@elierotenberg this answers my question 😄

Is there a tracking issue on Node.js (or is this a known limitation of Windows?). I'm on the Node.js tooling team, and would love to fix odd things like this.

[elierotenberg]

I couldn't find an issue on Node.js, because I believe it "works as intented" on Windows: symlinks in "dir" or "file" mode require elevated privileges, "junction" doesn't but only works on directories.
See also:

• a minimal reprod example
• Official Windows Doc on links
• related issue on nodejs repo

Another option would be to symlink (using junction on Windows, type being ignored on non-Windows hosts) the parent folder and use the original filename, would that be better?