The following occurs when installing npm prereqs within a fresh container:

This is a known issue with npm (https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17444) and appears to be filesystem related. Here's what we know so far:

• This issue only occurs on MacOS machines. Linux systems are fine.

• The r.js issue occurs while npm is linking binaries (the final step of the npm install process)

• We suspect it's due to some sort of filesystem race condition related to the container's mount of edx-platform.

• This issue occurs when running npm install from within a Docker container. It occurs on both clean and dirty devstacks.

• The r.js error always happens when no package-lock.json exists within edx-platform.

• When package-lock.json exists within edx-platform, the r.js error occurs sporadically, but frequently enough to be a nuisance.

• Sometimes, running npm install twice back to back succeeds, but not always.

• Running npm install from the host succeeds, but it adds an erroneous package fsevents to the package-lock.json. This package is MacOS-specific, may cause install errors on containers, and should not be checked into git.

• Installation succeeds when running npm install --no-bin-links (or adding bin-links = false to edx-platform's .npmrc). However, this causes problems later on because many of edx-platform's processes rely on those binary links.

• The r.js error continued to occur after changing the docker mounts for edx-platform to :delegated