Skip to main content

The Four Dots Disaster: How `../../../../` Nearly Killed Our Monorepo

· 2 min read
Max Kaido
Max Kaido
Architect

The Symptoms​

For weeks, our Docker builds were a nightmare:

  • ✅ Local builds: Perfect
  • ❌ Hecate server: Mysterious failures
  • ❌ GitHub Actions: Random crashes
  • ❌ Fresh clones: Consistent breakage

The error was always the same: dist directories missing, library dependencies not found, Nx claiming projects didn't exist that clearly existed.

The Red Herrings​

We chased every possible cause:

  • pnpm missing on Hecate → Installed it
  • Docker cache corruption → Cleared 27.91GB of cache
  • docker-compose v1 conflicts → Removed legacy version
  • Nx cache issues → Reset multiple times
  • Missing node_modules → Reinstalled everything

Nothing worked. Fresh installations failed 100% of the time.

The Breakthrough​

The hero moment came when examining a simple project.json file:

{
  "name": "kaido-types",
  "$schema": "../../../../node_modules/nx/schemas/project-schema.json"
}

Four dots. Four fucking dots.

From libs/core/kaido-types/project.json, this path resolves to:

  • ../ → libs/core/
  • ../ → libs/
  • ../ → repo root ✅ Should stop here!
  • ../ → user home directory ❌ DISASTER

The Revelation​

Every single libs/**/project.jsonfile had this bug. Nx was trying to validate schemas from~/node_modules/nx/schemas/instead of./node_modules/nx/schemas/.

When schema validation fails, Nx can't:

  • Parse build configurations correctly
  • Resolve output paths for dist directories
  • Generate proper dependency graphs
  • Cache build artifacts reliably

The Fix​

One sed command to rule them all:

find libs -name "project.json" -exec sed -i 's|\.\./\.\./\.\./\.\./node_modules|\.\./\.\./\.\./node_modules|g' {} \;

Result: Every build system immediately started working.

The Aftermath​

  • ✅ GitHub Actions: Green builds
  • ✅ Docker on Hecate: Clean builds
  • ✅ Tilt development: Smooth operation
  • ✅ Fresh clones: Work out of the box

The Lesson​

Sometimes the smallest typos cause the biggest disasters. Four dots vs three dots. One character difference that broke an entire build pipeline for weeks.

The real hero: The developer who refused to accept "it works locally" and kept digging until finding the root cause in a simple path resolution.

The Moral​

Trust your instincts. When fresh installations consistently fail but local development works, there's always a fundamental configuration bug hiding in plain sight.

Never again, ../../../../. Never again.