posted on Sat, Aug 04 '18 under tag: code

Sometimes the bugs are because your working directory is not clean

As I sat down to update my website today, docpad was not generating the site. But it was working correctly on the deployment server. Maybe it was a node issue. So I tried downgrading my node version - no use.

Then I tried installing docpad freshly after removing node_modules. No change, it kept throwing errors (and not very meaningful errors either).

Then I decided to see if it’s docpad’s error by creating a new site with docpad. That would compile perfectly.

So, I figured out it’s something to do with the configuration of my site.

And then I started uninstalling all the plugins I had. Nothing helped.

I deleted all the blog posts. Nothing helped.

I made sure every file in the skeleton site I had created and my site were the same - package.json, package-lock.json, even README. Still the skeleton site was working on docpad run but my site wasn’t.

Then I ran diff -arq skeleton_site my_site.

Turns out there was a 0 byte temporary file created by vim in my src/documents .#trauma.html.md and it was this file that was creating all the problems.

I removed the file and magically docpad run started working.

Of course I was working on a backup of my original site folder, and so, I removed the file in the original folder and voilah, no bug!

Lesson learned: when things aren’t working, try cleaning everything

Like what you are reading? Subscribe (by RSS, email, mastodon, or telegram)!