The tragedy of running an old Node project

You know, I ran into something similar recently with a static site engine (Zola). Was moving to a new host and figured I'd just copy and run the binary, only to have it fail due to linking OpenSSL. I had customized the internals years ago and stupidly never committed it anywhere, and attempting to build it fresh ran into issues with yanked crates.

Since it's just a binary though, I wound up grabbing the OpenSSL from the old box and patching the binary to just point to that instead. Thing runs fine after that.

This is all, of course, still totally stupid - but I did find myself thinking how much worse comparable events in JS have been for me over the years. What would have been easily an entire afternoon ended up taking 15 minutes - and a chunk of that was just double checking commands I'd long forgotten.

Hold on, you had to do binary surgery using an OpenSSL version from an old box you had? I salute the dedication.

How exactly does one do that. Sounds exciting!

What’s the issue with yanked crates? It should still build from your lockfile, even if it contains yanked crates.

That is nothing..Try building your Android project after leaving it idle for a week. Or better yet, try building you react native project you left for 2 days.

I think you copy the library file and add it to you load path

OMG I feel this in my soul. Try looking at one of the gradle files wrong in a kotlin multiplatform app with shared ui.

patchelf

but don't forget to make sure your new path is fewer characters than the original one so you don't overwrite any of the library

A sewing needle, a spare magnet, and a very steady hand.

Assuming you actually committed the lockfile...

Never underestimate the potential of past-you to have accidentally missed a tiny but essential step in a way that won't have made a noticeable difference at the time, yeah.

Not the OP but what sometimes works is as easy as:

``` ldd your-binary ``` on the old host and then copy all the thing that is referenced, put into ./foo and then start like so on new host: `LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./foo ./your-binary`. (may include typos, from memory)

A great tool for this used to be https://github.com/intoli/exodus - not sure if it still works.

Disclaimer: Also please don't do this with network-facing services, security applies, etc.pp. but it's a good trick to know.

This is why Nix (with flakes), in a git repository, will refuse to use a lockfile that isn't being tracked by git.

Nix also breaks if you try to update it, and you'll eventually have to update for security issues.

I'm stuck with a defunct Nix project I can't update, because crane and fenix flakes made breaking changes, and nix is giving me incomprehensible errors. I've spent enough time googling the errors that I'd be quicker to start over with a nix-less VM.

Looks to me he just copied a shared library and changed the search path.

Also, if it was statically linked, he wouldn't have that one problem. (Could have others, but not that one.)

I used it for something early this year, it was working then.

I think the other foot-gun here is that the official recommendation is that library crates not check-in their lockfile (I assume because that prevents downstream crates from freely taking updates to common dependencies).

This has the unfortunate side-effect that while downstream apps might still build, the library itself (and any examples in the library repo) may not compile after some time...

Yes, that's an excellent idea, and will free up time to deal with the *other* stupid mistakes past-me made :D