docker-mastery-for-nodejs | Docker Mastery for Node.js Projects , From a Docker Captain | Continuous Deployment library

Use npm ci (or add package-lock.json to your .dockerignore file, or delete package-lock.json in your local environment before building). The why is answered here.

EDIT:

Here's what I believe is going on. Disclaimer, I'm not an expert on nodejs or npm -- in fact I'm something of a novice. And all of this is conjecture based on some experiments.

npm is not linking the binaries for the dev dependencies via sym links in node_modules/.bin because the package-lock.json file has gotten into a corrupted state where the (prod) dependencies are in lockfileVersion 2 format, and the dev dependencies are still in lockfileVersion 1 format.

Note: Making a bunch of assumptions here.

1. Your local host using using npm 6, and the docker container is using npm 7. Because of this, the existing package-lock.json is in lockfileVersion: 1 which doesn't include a bin section for dependencies that have binaries. Version 2 does save the bin: section, which npm must use to determine what binaries to install/link.

2. When you run the production dependency install (e.g. NODE_ENV=production npm install), using npm version 7, npm is upgrading the version of your package-lock.json to lockfileVersion: 2, part of this includes saving bin: sections for the dependencies that install binaries. Importantly, it updates only the production dependencies. Now the package-lock.json file is corrupted because it claims to be in version 2 format, but all the dev dependencies are either still in version 1 or at least don't have the bin: section correctly applied.

3. When you now try to install your dev dependencies, npm sees that the package-lock.json is in lockfileVersion: 2, so it assumes that the dev dependencies have been upgraded as well (but they haven't been, or at least not correctly). It doesn't find the bin: sections because they don't exist and so it doesn't link the binaries to the node_modules/.bin/ directory.

You can perform a minimum reproduction of it using this Dockerfile: