global postinstall script fail on Windows 10 Bash about ngrok

[LexVocoder]

Workaround is to run winpty ngrok instead of just ngrok. It looks like the problem is how Windows ngrok doesn't really know how to use the Windows console.

ngrok is certainly not alone in needing this treatment.

[inconshreveable]

Thanks @bubenshchykov! I've had a few reports of this as well, it's a known issue. Win10 bash is still in beta and ngrok doesn't officially support it yet. I'll try to get an environment up asap and figure out what's going on.

[bubenshchykov]

hi man! as a quick test, can you try it with latest npm (3.10.5)

npm cache clean
npm i -g npm
npm i -g ngrok

i see that your environment is a bit out of date :)

info using [email protected]
3 info using [email protected]

If that doesn't help, you can try a potential fix I blindly pushed here, as I can't spin up windows vm at the moment #59
npm i github:bubenshchykov/ngrok#7f5db0d26 -g

Even if install succeeds, I don't think I ever managed to make global install working on windows - because of tricks with executables and "cmd" wrappers. The only option I see for now is to make a small node.js script "ngrok-global.js", which will spawn ngrok binary in child process and output it to the parent one. Then having "bin": { "ngrok": "node bin/ngrok-global"} should work cross-OS. Would be awesome if you can try it out.

[jdalton]

Cool! I'm using the current LTS release of Node with an npm from this June. Its v2 but not out of date. The ngrok install works fine globally on Windows 10. Bash on Win10 is Ubuntu (where the issue is).

[jdalton]

Ok so I thought I saw it complete once. Here's the complete install:

 ~ npm i -g ngrok
/home/jdalton/.nvm/versions/node/v4.4.7/bin/ngrok -> /home/jdalton/.nvm/versions/node/v4.4.7/lib/node_modules/ngrok/bin/ngrok

> [email protected] postinstall /home/jdalton/.nvm/versions/node/v4.4.7/lib/node_modules/ngrok
> node ./postinstall.js

ngrok - downloading binary https://bin.equinox.io/a/b87faFPKrii/ngrok-2.1.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz ...
ngrok - binary downloaded...
ngrok - binary unpacked.
[email protected] /home/jdalton/.nvm/versions/node/v4.4.7/lib/node_modules/ngrok
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected] ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])
├── [email protected] ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])
└── [email protected] ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])

after than though which ngrok will report /home/jdalton/.nvm/versions/node/v4.4.7/bin/ngrok
but executing it is a noop it just goes back to bash.

It noops on npm v3 too.
Is there some prerequisites that could be missing?

[bubenshchykov]

No prerequisites..
For global install the flow is simple

• postinstall downloads proper ngrok bin and puts it to bin folder (./ngrok/bin executable)
• then package.json has this default "bin": {"ngrok": "./bin/ngrok"} which does this npm linking magic

Nothing really more..

There might be something wrong with timing of things: bin/ngrok is available only after postinstall, but npm symlinking seems to do smth even before.. That's why global install was failing before I put dummy ./bin/ngrok https://github.com/bubenshchykov/ngrok/blob/master/bin/ngrok - I had to add this craziness after recent npm releases )

Few random ideas to try

• npm i github:bubenshchykov/ngrok#402db7f -g - including the whole "bin" folder into npm "files", I don't believe in it though )
• or instead of text stub https://github.com/bubenshchykov/ngrok/blob/master/bin/ngrok, maybe chmod-ed executable with some dummy echo will work better

The way npm symlinking works has been changed over the last year I think, I might be missing some small detail - but honestly I'm out of good clues for now. Any ideas are welcome :)

[bubenshchykov]

@inconshreveable Alan people say ngrok is not working on Windows 10 bash, even if downloaded directly ngrok.com (#60)