How do you install Firebase tools in a Gitlab CI Runner?

Question

I'm having some trouble configuring Gitlab CI to run firebase emulators. In particular, it's failing to install firebase-tools. This is the relevant part of my config

unit-test-job: # This job runs in the test stage.
  image: node:14.14.0
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - "test-results.xml"
    reports:
      junit: "test-results.xml"
  stage: test
  script:
    - apt-get update && apt-get install -y openjdk-8-jdk
    - npm i
    - npm i -g firebase-tools
    - firebase use $MY_PROJECT
    - echo "Running unit tests..."
    - npm run test:ci

When trying to install firebase-tools I get this error from the CI

$ npm i -g firebase-tools
npm WARN deprecated request@2.88.2: request has been deprecated, see https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142
npm WARN deprecated uuid@3.4.0: Please upgrade  to version 7 or higher.  Older versions may use Math.random() in certain circumstances, which is known to be problematic.  See https://v8.dev/blog/math-random for details.
npm WARN deprecated har-validator@5.1.5: this library is no longer supported
/usr/local/bin/firebase -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/lib/bin/firebase.js
> re2@1.16.0 install /usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/node_modules/re2
> install-from-cache --artifact build/Release/re2.node --host-var RE2_DOWNLOAD_MIRROR || npm run rebuild
Trying https://github.com/uhop/node-re2/releases/download/1.16.0/linux-x64-83.br ...
Writing to build/Release/re2.node ...
Trying https://github.com/uhop/node-re2/releases/download/1.16.0/linux-x64-83.gz ...
Writing to build/Release/re2.node ...
Building locally ...
npm ERR! code EACCES
npm ERR! syscall scandir
npm ERR! path /root/.npm/_logs
npm ERR! errno -13
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Your cache folder contains root-owned files, due to a bug in
npm ERR! previous versions of npm which has since been addressed.
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! To permanently fix this problem, please run:
npm ERR!   sudo chown -R 65534:0 "/root/.npm"
glob error [Error: EACCES: permission denied, scandir '/root/.npm/_logs'] {
  errno: -13,
  code: 'EACCES',
  syscall: 'scandir',
  path: '/root/.npm/_logs'
}
> re2@1.16.0 rebuild /usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/node_modules/re2
> node-gyp rebuild
gyp WARN EACCES current user ("nobody") does not have permission to access the dev dir "/root/.cache/node-gyp/14.14.0"
gyp WARN EACCES attempting to reinstall using temporary dev dir "/usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/node_modules/re2/.node-gyp"
gyp WARN install got an error, rolling back install
gyp WARN install got an error, rolling back install
gyp ERR! configure error 
gyp ERR! stack Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/node_modules/re2/.node-gyp'
gyp ERR! System Linux 5.4.109+
gyp ERR! command "/usr/local/bin/node" "/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
gyp ERR! cwd /usr/local/lib/node_modules/firebase-tools/node_modules/re2
gyp ERR! node -v v14.14.0
gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v5.1.0
gyp ERR! not ok 
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! re2@1.16.0 rebuild: `node-gyp rebuild`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the re2@1.16.0 rebuild script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Answer 1

You're actually encountering an issue that isn't necessarily related to gitlab-ci, but it actually related to node 14. Essentially that /root/.npm folder has bad permissions in node 14. You have three ways you can fix this:

1. Update to Node 15 (just change your image to node:15 ) which fixes the permission issue
2. Allow node permissions to scan the folder. This is insinuated by the error message you have in the above error where it tells you the directory can't be scanned. The easiest way to resolve this issue is to remove the -g off the second node install, which will make it deploy to the user folder instead of global. Since you're rebuilding the container every time and using the same user each time, the -g to install globally is redundant in this case.
3. Install Firebase using the standalone method to get the CLI instead of using NPM to install it. You can do this in a docker container using curl -sL firebase.tools | sed 's/sudo //g' | bash curl -sL firebase.tools | sed 's/sudo //g' | bash

Hopefully this helps!