Meteor complains about missing npm package that's definitely in package.json

help
#1

I’m trying to use Sentry’s server-side npm package (raven) with Meteor, and getting the following error when I deploy my app:

Error: Can’t find npm module ‘raven’. Did you forget to call ‘Npm.depends’ in package.js within the ‘modules-runtime’ package?

Why is this happening?

#2

I just booted up an Ubuntu server and cloned my repo and ran meteor --production and everything runs just fine. This only seems to happen when I deploy to Galaxy. I also deployed via pm2-meteor to an Ubuntu server and that failed as well.

#3

Got it. So, here’s how I was including Sentry’s logger:

import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor';
import { version } from '/package.json';
let Raven;

export function ravenInit() {
  if (!Meteor.isServer) return;

  const r = require; // using r shortcut suppresses Raven dependency warnings
  Raven = r('raven'); // in this case, stop bitching about "pg" package

  Raven.config(Meteor.settings.sentryDsn, {
    environment: process.env.NODE_ENV,
    release: version,
  });

  return Raven;
}

Raven was giving me warnings about not installing pg and its related packages, and it doesn’t necessarily need those. So I learned in another thread that if you alias require to r, it will silence warnings while in development. Works great.

However, apparently when deploying to a server, this r() was causing problems. The strange thing is, it was still recognized as require since it was complaining about not being able to find a module. But when I changed the code:

Raven = require('raven');

Things deployed just fine. Why did this happen?? It doesn’t make any sense!