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Nodejs + npm, installing modules on ntfs partition

Asked 2011-11-22T19:45:00.640
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I have a problem when installing npm modules. NodeJS is installed on Ubuntu 11.10 running on Virtual Box on Windows host. My project files are on NTFS partition (I have to share them with windows). When I try to install some npm module I get an error, and module is not installed. I've found out that problem occurs when npm tries to create symbolic links.

Probably you can not create symlinks on NTFS partition, when I'm installing module "inside" Linux file system, everything works fine.

How can I fix this? I don't want to resolve dependencies manually :/

node.js ubuntu symlink ntfs npm
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I am pretty certain symlinks can't be created on the shared drive ("shared folder"). Even more impossible with a Windows host machine and a Linux guest.

The host machines are not aware of the filesystem of the guests. A guest machine is a blackbox for the host. You can't say to the host "Well this links to /etc/..." when the host doesn't know where this /etc is :).

So in short: unfortunately no.

In some more detail:

I would be really happy if I am wrong! It is a major pain in my development process.

I tried so many options. By default the filesystem that the "shared folders" use is vboxsf, something if not the same as samba (default network sharing protocol for windows) so:

  1. I tried using native Windows network sharing and then mounting the network drive in the guest as the guest and host are on the same network. The problem was still there.
  2. I tried running a NFS server on windows (Hanewin NFS Server) along with SFU/SUA (Windows Services for UNIX) but this has problems with GIT locks. Probably other problems as well - it was a while ago and I don't clearly remember
  3. I tried the reverse: sharing a directory on the virtual machine to windows. But that is stupid as all the files will be on the virtual box and is reaally slow to access on windows
  4. I was being stupid and I though "well let's mount a virtual drive on both windows and linux" - don't try this, corrupts the virtual disk. Something I should have known.

There might be a network sharing protocol other than samba and nfs which will perhaps copy the files whenever "symlink" creation is attempted? I don't know really.

However I haven'

answered 2012-09-30T11:55:46.550

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