fresh installs of js-ipfs fail to build with browserify. peer-id suspect

[npfoss]

• Version: 0.36.4 and 0.37.0-rc.0 (didn't test others)
• Platform: Linux npfoss-yoga-1810 4.18.0-25-generic node-multihashing and multihash #26-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jun 24 09:32:08 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Subsystem: peer-id suspected

Type: Bug

Severity: High

Description:

I reported this here but since it's breaking all of js-ipfs I thought it would be good to draw more attention in the main repo.

Browserify-ing any recent version of js-ipfs fails with:

Error: Cannot find module 'babelify' from '/path/to/code/node_modules/peer-id/node_modules/async'

I looked into this some and I think the problem is that peer-id had a semver lapse, because lots of js-ipfs things depend on ~0.12.x and with 0.12.2 everything is fine, but 10 days ago 0.12.3, 0.13.0, 0.13.1, and 0.13.2 were published in quick succession. Now when installing fresh, package-lock.json shows some instances of 0.12.3. The very close pattern of releases makes me think they realized it wasn't working and pushed some fixes, but forgot to remove the broken versions, especially 0.12.3.

Steps to reproduce the error:

package.json

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "browserify index.js -o app.js -d"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "browserify": "^16.3.0",
    "ipfs": "^0.36.4"
  }
}

index.js

require('ipfs');

run

npm install
npm run build

Also available to be cloned here: https://github.com/npfoss/js-ipfs-bug-code

[alanshaw]

Cross posting here for reference:

This looks like it might be an issue with v3 of async caolan/async#1653 (comment)

libp2p/js-peer-id#96 (comment)

async added a browserify transform (babelify) to their package.json but do not depend on it themselves. If your project also does not depend on babelify you'll get this error because browserify will attempt to use the transform but it is not installed.

You can work around it by adding ignoreTransform: ['babelify'] for the time being.

[npfoss]

That fixed it, thank you so much!

I pushed the fix to that github repo for anyone who's interested

[alanshaw]

A new version of peer-id (0.12.4) has been released reverting to async@2 in order to address this issue.