yarn and 'Extracting tar content of undefined failed, the file appears to be corrupt'

1-minute read
technical
yarn • npm • node

Here’s a funny one.

One day, at $WORK, CI started to fail when running yarn install:

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error https://registry.yarnpkg.com/ol/-/ol-6.12.0.tgz: 
Extracting tar content of undefined failed, the file appears to be corrupt: 
"ENOENT: no such file or directory, 
chmod '/home/runner/.cache/yarn/v6/npm-ol-6.12.0-0de51abad0aaeb0eca41cba3c6d26ee485a3e92b-integrity/node_modules/ol/format/KML.js'"

After some digging we found that’s due to a race condition that made yarn pull the same dependency in parallel.

The workaround? yarn --network-concurrency=1

And that was fine for a while.

Although it was slow. So I decided to investigate it a bit further.

Somebody found out that it happens when you import a git repository, and that repository contains a prepare script.

Luckily (or by design), there was only a repo dependency, that we control.

Removing the prepare upstream solved the issue.