KETTLE-75: Kettle's argument parsing is environmentally unsound

Description

Kettle strategy for grabbing command-line arguments willy-nilly makes it impossible to start up applications in some cases if additional arguments are being passed to node.exe or electron.exe.

For example, attempting to start up gpii-app via electron --inspect-brk main.js gives a failure on startup as the filename argument gets interpreted as the config directory via the following code in KettleConfigName:

kettle.config.getConfigPath = function (outerDefault) {
    var arg2 = process.argv[2];
    if (arg2 === "-") {
        arg2 = null;
    }
    var configPath = arg2 || outerDefault;

It seems there was some ancient attempt here to allow the skipping of some arguments. We should replace this with a scheme which shows some better sense of the argument structure and can skip everything until it finds the filename, and/or only recognise named arguments, or perhaps even abolish this scheme altogether.

At the time of the call, the process arguments are [V:\node_modules\electron\dist\electron.exe, --inspect-brk, main.js]

The failure we get is:

App threw an error during load
Error: Assertion failure - check console for more details: Could not find a config file at any of the paths V:\main.js\app.testing, V:\main.js\app.testing.json, V:\main.js\app.testing.json5

Comments

• Antranig Basman commented 2019-01-30T10:54:30.904-0500

  As a quick "hot patch" to allow people to use, e.g. --inspect-brk by hot-editing kettle from inside node_modules, this set of changes will simply disable Kettle's command-line parsing:

  diff --git a/lib/KettleConfigLoader.js b/lib/KettleConfigLoader.js
  index 6a36abb..6d203ba 100644
  --- a/lib/KettleConfigLoader.js
  +++ b/lib/KettleConfigLoader.js
   -28,7 +28,8  fluid.defaults("kettle.config", {
    * is suitable for appearing as the configName field in the options to <code>kettle.config.createDefaults</code> etc.
    */
   kettle.config.getConfigName = function (outerDefault) {
  -    var nodeEnv = process.argv[3] || process.env.NODE_ENV || outerDefault;
  +    console.log("Process arguments are " + process.argv);
  +    var nodeEnv = process.env.NODE_ENV || outerDefault;
       if (nodeEnv) {
           fluid.log("Loader running configuration name " + nodeEnv);
       } else {
   -42,10 +43,7  kettle.config.getConfigName = function (outerDefault) {
    * is suitable for appearing as the configPath field in the options to <code>kettle.config.createDefaults</code> etc.
    */
   kettle.config.getConfigPath = function (outerDefault) {
  -    var arg2 = process.argv[2];
  -    if (arg2 === "-") {
  -        arg2 = null;
  -    }
  +    var arg2 = null;
       var configPath = arg2 || outerDefault;
       if (!configPath) {
           fluid.fail("Config path must be specified as 1st command line argument");
  

• Antranig Basman commented 2019-02-04T06:59:40.077-0500

  Note that this is more specifically a problem with executing electron apps from the command line. There is a long-standing fault in electron argument parsing which fails to strip off the V8-specific arguments which precede the script filename which is intended to appear in process.argv[1]. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/4690 - this stackExchange answer explains the distinction between process.argv and process.execArgv which is observed in plain node but not with electron - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4351521/how-do-i-pass-command-line-arguments-to-a-node-js-program#comment57056011_4351548