firebase-tools: Random `Function failed on loading user code. Error message:` with no error message

Hey @samtstern!

I talked to Firebase support and they helped me understand enough to fix it. =]

Turns out that in my firebase logs I was getting something like

{"@type":"type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.audit.AuditLog","status":{"code":3,"message":"INVALID_ARGUMENT"},"authenticationInfo":{"principalEmail":"user@domain.ext"},"requestMetadata":{"requestAttributes":{},"destinationAttributes":{}},"serviceName":"cloudfunctions.googleapis.com","methodName":"google.cloud.functions.v1.CloudFunctionsService.UpdateFunction","resourceName":"projects/gitl-firebase-dev/locations/us-central1/functions/offerPush"}

which apparently means that the function timed out on its initial startup.

So I needed to move some of my top-level requires inside the functions so they don’t happen on cold-start.

I just thought you (or anyone who finds this later) would like to know.

Thanks again!

Check if you have some dependencies installed on your root folder. You should have all your modules installed inside the functions folder. Only firebase dependencies should be in your root folder. Try to do npm uninstall yourDependencie inside your root folder and then npm i yourDependencie inside root/functions folder.

@Enzo-21 Thank you very much. This solved my problem. I ran npm install from inside functions folder for the package I needed and it worked like charm.

@armordog there are no situations where we want to give you no error message. That’s clearly a bug. The issue is that we can’t fix this unless we can reproduce it on our machine and then dig into it. So any more information is really useful.

I know you said the --debug logs were not useful but could you post them anyway? Also you mention restarting builds, is this often fixed by running the same deploy command again?

@armordog we’re gonna need a little more information to track this down. When you say “Deploying any function ever.” do you mean that this happens even if you just deploy a helloWorld function?

Could you try running firebase init functions in a temporary directory somewhere and then doing firebase deploy and seeing if you still see this error?

Also, running deploy with --debug gives me a lot more output but it’s all successes until the above-mentioned useless error.