Gitlab CI Build issue

Question

I have the following pipeline:

stages:          # List of stages for jobs, and their order of execution
  - pre-build
  - build
  - build-image
  - lint
  - test
  - deploy
  - post-deploy

pre-build-job:
    stage: pre-build
    image: node:latest
    script: npm install

When my pipeline run I am getting the following error

Running with gitlab-runner 14.10.0~beta.50.g1f2fe53e (1f2fe53e)
  on blue-2.shared.runners-manager.gitlab.com/default XxUrkriX
Preparing the "docker+machine" executor
00:31
Using Docker executor with image node:latest ...
Pulling docker image node:latest ...
Using docker image sha256:b6c4441a8ff54a943185c37bdca51cc45304d3b22e985dcc3bf7b5e1d680f7ea for node:latest with digest node@sha256:82f9e078898dce32c7bf3232049715f1b8fbf0d62d5f3091bca20fcaede50bf0 ...
Preparing environment
00:03
Running on runner-xxurkrix-project-17041112-concurrent-0 via runner-xxurkrix-shared-1652891281-7b8723e4...
Getting source from Git repository
00:02
$ eval "$CI_PRE_CLONE_SCRIPT"
Fetching changes with git depth set to 50...
Initialized empty Git repository in /builds/*****/.git/
Created fresh repository.
Checking out a61c9061 as master...
Skipping Git submodules setup
Executing "step_script" stage of the job script
00:01
Using docker image sha256:b6c4441a8ff54a943185c37bdca51cc45304d3b22e985dcc3bf7b5e1d680f7ea for node:latest with digest node@sha256:82f9e078898dce32c7bf3232049715f1b8fbf0d62d5f3091bca20fcaede50bf0 ...
$ npm install
npm ERR! code ENOENT
npm ERR! syscall open
npm ERR! path /builds/****/package.json
npm ERR! errno -2
npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/builds/****/package.json'
npm ERR! enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
npm ERR! enoent 
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2022-05-18T16_29_25_203Z-debug-0.log
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
00:01
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

what do I need to do? I am confused.

Thanks

Answer 1

When the runner runs it pulls the repository to a folder called "/builds" and does its job from there.

Initialized empty Git repository in /builds/*****/.git/

So once it started with the first command: npm install

It couldn't find the package.json file under the '/builds' directory.

As the error says:

npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/builds/****/package.json'

Please make sure your package.json is checked to git and is available there in the build directory.