Typescript compilation fails (in Docker) when NODE_ENV=production

Question

So I have a create-react-app-ts app that I would like to Dockerize and host on Zeit Now.

Everything works fine locally, running yarn tsc and react-scripts-ts build works great.

Creating the Docker image also works great from the following Dockerfile:

FROM mhart/alpine-node:10.9
WORKDIR /usr/src

ARG REACT_APP_API_ENDPOINT
ARG NODE_ENV

COPY yarn.lock package.json ./
RUN yarn

COPY . .
RUN yarn build && mv build /public

However, when publishing to Now, the build script fails on Typescript compilation, outputting compilation errors for most files in the project.

I am able to reproduce that locally as well if I set ENV NODE_ENV production in my Dockerfile just above WORKDIR....

So it would seem that either Typescript or react-scripts-ts acts differently when NODE_ENV=production. I've never encountered this error before, and I don't know how to debug it. Running NODE_ENV=production tsc or NODE_ENV=production react-scripts-ts build also works fine locally.

I'm running Typescript v 3.0.1 with the following config:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "outDir": "build/dist",
    "module": "esnext",
    "target": "es6",
    "lib": ["es6", "dom", "esnext.asynciterable"],
    "sourceMap": true,
    "allowJs": true,
    "jsx": "react",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "rootDir": "src",
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "noImplicitThis": true,
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "strictNullChecks": true,
    "suppressImplicitAnyIndexErrors": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "strict": true
  },
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "build", "scripts", "acceptance-tests", "webpack", "jest", "src/setupTests.ts"]
}

Any advice would be much appreciated! :)

EDIT: Added env var args to the Dockerfile. It was originally left out for the sake of brevity, but it ended up being part of the issue and solution

Answer 1

So I finally found the issue! In my original Dockerfile, NODE_ENV was set before yarn install. This means that for the production build, yarn would not install devDependencies, and therefore not any of my @types libraries. This caused all the compilation errors all over the project.

Moving the definition of NODE_ENV below/after yarn install in the Dockerfile solved the issue.

FROM mhart/alpine-node:10.9
WORKDIR /usr/src

COPY yarn.lock package.json ./
RUN yarn

ARG REACT_APP_API_ENDPOINT
ARG NODE_ENV

COPY . .
RUN yarn build && mv build /public

Note: As far as I know, yarn build will make sure to remove the devDependencies again, so don't worry about this bloating your build. :)