Relay: Can't get examples to work

[nareshbhatia]

I am seeing several issues that say examples don't work. However they are either closed or referencing each other with no definitive answers. Here's my attempt at the latest code base.

cd examples/todo
npm install

This gives the following error:

Error: Cannot find module 'babel-core'

Ok, so I install babel-core locally:

npm install babel-core

Now try npm install again and I get the same error.

Can someone please change the README with even a temporary workaround? It's really frustrating that I cannot even start learning the framework.

P.S. I have [email protected] and [email protected] installed globally.

[stubailo]

Yeah I can't get npm install to succeed from anywhere.

[wincent]

It's definitely frustrating that the examples keep breaking. We try to test that they still work with each release, but we've found that the non-deterministic nature of NPM installs can cause things to break in hard-to-reproduce ways (for example, I can blow away my node_modules folder(s) and get a different result from you depending on when I ran npm install and in what order).

One thing I'd like to do is partly control this chaos in two ways:

• Cut the number of examples in the repo to one (the todo), move the other examples into a separate, community-supported "unofficial" repo.
• Use npm shrinkwrap in the examples to peg them and all of their dependencies to released versions.

This latter point would mean that you could use the examples to test master without some manual set-up (for example, you might have to blow away the npm-shrinkwrap.json file and possible set up links with npm link), but at least it would mean the chances of getting a working result after a from-scratch npm install would be much greater.

Would anybody be interested in working on this? (I don't think this is something I can get to myself over the next week or two, as I am very focused on mutations work right now.)

[wincent]

Just a quick update: @steveluscher has done a fair bit of work over the last few days upgrading dependencies (of particular significance, moving 6-to-5 Babel from 5 to 6), so we'll probably cut a new release soon with that work, and that would be a good time to revisit this question of having verifying that everything works out of the box.

[nareshbhatia]

Any update on this?

[wincent]

@steveluscher is upgrading a bunch of stuff in #1118 and #1119, which means we'll be able to do a release soon. I don't think there is much point in trying to make things work until (one of?) those have landed. But at that point, I think it would be great to do some of the things I mentioned in my comment above.

[nareshbhatia]

Awesome! Thanks for the update @wincent.

[nareshbhatia]

Any updates? I see that both #1118 and #1119 are closed, but I have not seen a new release.

[Dielz98]

The same with todoMVC

[BilalBudhani]

Yes, even the todoMVC doesn't work anymore.

[wincent]

New release is likely to happen this week. We'll check that all the examples work, but there are lots of local-system variables, tooling version issues, and ordering issues that may mean that they don't work in specific circumstances, so _once the release is out_ we'll be grateful for any reports of specific issues (and ideally _fixes_ for those issues, because we may not be able to repro them).

In the meantime, duplicate reports of things not working won't really help resolve things.

@sampepose: do you think we should do the things I mentioned above (using shrinkwrap and cutting the number of examples down to one) before or after we cut the release?

[steveluscher]

I cleaned up the examples for the release of 0.9.0. Give them a try!

[steveluscher]

We're in the middle of a little bit of a revert/unrevert situation, so if anyone wants to try the examples in the next 24 hours or so be sure to check out the v0.9.0 tag:

git clone [email protected]:facebook/relay.git
cd relay
git checkout tags/v0.9.0