npm install in GitHub Action fails with "ENOENT: no such file or directory" - Works fine elsewhere

Question

I am currently working on replacing our Drone CI installation with GitHub Actions.

The Action Workflow I have so far boils down to the following .github/workflows/ci.yml file:

on: [ push, pull_request ]

name: CI
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Install Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '13.x'

      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm install

The log itself comes out as a long series of npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory ala the truncated list below.

2020-04-29T21:15:31.7899082Z npm install
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/acorn-26d8ba97/dist/acorn.js.map'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/coffeescript-acee515b/lib/coffee-script/register.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/coffeescript-acee515b/lib/coffee-script/repl.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/coffeescript-acee515b/lib/coffee-script/rewriter.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/tslint-c216b578/LICENSE'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/eslint-cd3dbe58/LICENSE'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/eslint-cd3dbe58/README.md'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/typescript-b4b55d18/lib/diagnosticMessages.generated.json'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/jquery-1794793b/dist/jquery.min.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/lodash-05c1df31/fp/_convertBrowser.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/lodash-70e4a396/fp/_convertBrowser.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/lodash-79f5ae17/fp/_convertBrowser.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/lodash-e49b02f6/fp/_convertBrowser.js'
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/runner/work/project/project/node_modules/.staging/lodash-16fa050d/fp/_convertBrowser.js'

The advice I have found online is to rm package-lock.json but that's not an acceptable solution as I need to test our code with the exact versions of our dependencies we have locked.

Further, I don't believe there is anything wrong with our package-lock.json file to begin with because it still npm install 's as expected both locally and on our Drone CI installation.

Answer 1

At long wait, I found the solution here:

Install an npm module from a private GitHub repository using GitHub Actions

      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          persist-credentials: false
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x
      - run: git config --global url."https://${{ secrets.PAT }}@github.com/".insteadOf ssh://[email protected]/
      - run: npm ci
      ...

I had tried basically all of this on my own but the most important part was missing:

        with:
          persist-credentials: false

actions/checkout@v2 will by default mess with some settings for Git and prevent insteadOf from working properly.