Welcome back!

The year was 2023. I started off with a post about Finale. Feel free to hop over there and read how Finale has ceased to be. I suppose more happened to them than to me! I did a couple of updates to the site in the summer but other than that, not a peep out of me here for over a year! Well, I've done something--sort of.

During this time of nothing new, my friend, Dependabot was constantly telling me I had a problem with webpack or path-to-regexp or nanoid 🙄. If it looked harmless enough I accepted the pull request and the site would build. Now so much more secure! There were a lot of updates that were too major for me to give it the okay to do. I know if I'm going to do some major Gatsby upgrades, I'm going to have to do more than just upgrade packages! Speaking of which!

Let's upgrade packages!

I thought it would be a good idea to try and get up to Gatsby 5 and the assorted plug-ins at some point. One of the first things I read in the Migrating from v4 to v5 Gatsby Documentation was upgrade Gatsby and all plugins to the latest v4 version.

Sounds good!

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1npm upgrade --save
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3# how'd it do?
4npm outdated

Nothing's outdated!

Does it work in Development? Yep! Can I build it locally? Yes!

Gatsby 5 time

I start trying to upgrade to Gatsby 5, React 18, blah blah blah, yadda yadda, and I see that I really have to upgrade gatsby-plugin-mdx from v3 to v4. I remember that was the thing that stopped me from working on this site last year!

Not Gatsby 5 time

"At least I can push these upgraded packages," I think to myself. Off they go! But, the build fails in my GitHub Action! Here's the error bit...

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1error "gatsby-plugin-mdx" threw an error while running the createSchemaCustomization lifecycle:
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3Cannot read property 'setParserPlugins' of undefined
4
5
6  TypeError:Cannot read property 'setParserPlugins' of undefined

Research finds a bunch of articles about very old versions of gatsby-plugin-mdx that had a bug. Some articles are about how things aren't working in dev (or build, locally) due to programming bugs. I don't have any of those stopping the build.

I try reverting to the prior commit that worked, it builds locally, but it still does not build in GitHub. I tried tweaking versions here and there and it still doesn't work. I'm freaking out. I'll never be able to update this site again!

Finally, I find a GitHub issue where Ruben Harutyunyan casually mentions, "Since it works locally but fails on the server, I can only assume that your NodeJS/Yarn/npm versions on the server are what's causing the issue."

Thanks Ruben!

I want to live again!

My server is...somewhere in GitHub land. I remember setting up the GitHub action a long time ago. Did it mention something about node in there?

Sure enough, in my .yaml file, it says:

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1node-version: [14.x]

14?! I change it to 22.x and everything is working perfectly again! Now I can upload new content and stop procrastinating. Well, I can certainly upload this one new article!

Attributions

Photo by Nick Fewings (@jannerboy62) on Unsplash>