Symlink Modules Not Archived

[hybby]

Summary

Hello, I came cross an issue when moving to Speculate from an old build process.

Basically, we have a NodeJS project which makes use of file: dependencies.

After an npm install, those dependencies are present in node_modules as symlinks:

# ls -ld node_modules/bbcid-vertex-logger
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jenkins jenkins 48 Jun 19 15:47 node_modules/bbcid-vertex-logger -> ../../apigee-vertex/packages/bbcid-vertex-logger

However, the contents of files under that symlink never make it into the SOURCES/*.tar.gz file. Instead, only the symlink itself is copied into the archive:

# tar -tf SOURCES/bbcidv5-openam-apigee.tar.gz  | grep bbcid-vertex-logger
node_modules/bbcid-vertex-logger

Potential Solution?

I suspect that the archiving function of speculate is deciding not to follow the symlinks. I believe that instead, any links should be followed and the files pointed to should be archived (similar to the -h (--dereference) flag of the TAR utility.

Would this be possible by setting options.dereference to true in archiver.js? (docs). This could even be placed behind a flag like --follow-symlinks if it isn't the desired ordinary behaviour.

Workaround

Use rsync to copy out all the links first of all. I used this in my Makefile:

	rsync --archive --verbose --copy-links ./node_modules/ ./node_modules_no_symlinks/
	rm -r ./node_modules/
	mv ./node_modules_no_symlinks/ ./node_modules/