Unable to access project due to problematic package.json

Glitch Help
1

I accidentally added "start": "yes" to package.json, and the server seems to be running yes command. After that change, the edit page is taking forever to load, so I can’t do anything on it (e.g. edit out the offending line, remove package.json entirely, or even change the project settings). Didn’t try the VSCode plugin, but I don’t think it’ll help either since it seems to be a server-side issue.

The project name is phaser-scratchpad, and it’s currently private. Can anyone help fixing it? (Maybe this is another reason to add “restart server manually” or “kill server” option.)

2

“yes” is supposed to run without end, lol!

How to kill a runaway process.

Assuming logged into Glitch, open a browser tab to this url, putting in your project name at the end …

https://glitch.com/edit/console.html?myproject

This opens a console, do the following

$ ps -aux

Should show something like this, with lots more rows …

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
app        204  0.0  0.0  19956  3732 pts/2    S    08:50   0:00 -su
app        217  0.0  0.0   6008   652 pts/1    R+   08:51   0:01 yes
app        218  0.0  0.0  36084  3192 pts/2    R+   08:51   0:00 ps -aux

Find the offending process, read its process id (PID) from the second column, then tell it to be killed …

$ kill -9 217

If there is no error message, just another prompt, then it worked.

That’s it, the editor will hopefully recover. You can check its status from Tools > Container Status.

Warning like most linux commands, kill can mess up your server if you use it incorrectly, and can damage your hearing if you put it in your ear.

3

I tried to open the following URL

https://glitch.com/edit/console.html?phaser-scratchpad

but it throws “ping timeout”. Looking at the console, all the socket.io requests are emitting 504 error (gateway timeout).

LwYgkP0.png774×653

4

Sounds like it needs intervention from Glitch support, hopefully @cori can help.

6

Hey @Bubbler, sorry for the bother! All I can do here is to restore your project from a backup, unfortunately. Here are a couple of backup candidate timestamps to choose from that seem the most likely to be appropriate (all times UTC):

  1. 2019-09-11 08:02:06.000
  2. 2019-09-11 11:51:40.000

If you believe neither of those are the appropriate one (or if we pick one and it turns out not to be the right one) there are a few others we can choose from.

7

The one where the package.json doesn’t have yes will do. Probably the one right before #1, I guess.

9

Hey @Bubbler We can’t easily see the contents of the backup without restoring it - I ended up walking back through a few backups to find one that seemed to work - please take a look and let us know how it goes!

1 Like
10

The project is now working, thanks a lot!

1 Like