Invalid now.json - files Invalid request: files should NOT have more than 10000 items..

[bigsee]

I have a small Nuxt site deployed on Vercel which has been there for ages. I haven't deployed it for probably six months.

Just tried to make a simple text change and re-deploy and now I get the following error. The old now.json was something like this:

{
  "name": "my-project",
  "version": 2,
  "alias": [
    "my-project.co.uk",
    "www.my-project.co.uk"
  ],
  "builds": [
    {
      "src": "nuxt.config.js",
      "use": "@nuxtjs/now-builder",
      "config": {
        "serverFiles": [
          "middleware/**",
          "plugins/**",
          "lib/**"
        ]
      }
    }
  ],
  "routes": [
    { "src": "/_nuxt/.+", "headers": { "cache-control": "s-maxage=31536000" } },
    { "src": "^/(.*)", "dest": "/" }
  ],
  "public": false
}

I've since tried replacing @nuxtjs/now-builder with @nuxtjs/vercel-builder. I've also tried zero config with no vercel.json or now.json and every combination in between. I make sure to delete all nuxt and vercel folders and caches between each attempt. Every time I get the same error:

Invalid now.json - 'files' Invalid request: 'files' should NOT have more than 10000 items..

There is also a link to the docs here: https://vercel.com/docs/configuration#project/files but this doesn't yield anything obvious.

What am I doing wrong?

[bigsee]

*bump*

Just wondering if anyone has any feedback on this? Feels like a bug to me and the docs link in the area contain no information on the subject that I can see.

[bigsee]

I have not been able to get this working so I've now submitted a formal support request. If anyone else has any ideas in the meantime, I'd be grateful to read them.

[abzr1]

I just noticed that the link you were provided with doesn't actually go anywhere. There is no files heading on that page in the docs. This is worth pointing out to the support team.

[bigsee]

I will do that

[abzr1]

Some of the fields you are using are now deprecated:

• name: use Project Linking instead.
• version: since ZEIT 1.0 is shut down, this always defaults to 2 so should not be set anyway,
• alias: to assign a custom Domain to your Project, define it in the Project Settings instead.
• routes: to customize the platform's routing behaviour, use cleanUrls, trailingSlash, redirects, rewrites, and/or headers instead.
• public is false by default, so no need to specify it (it is not deprecated, however)

Also, the now.json file should be renamed to vercel.json, because it may be deprecated soon.

Make sure you have the latest version of the Vercel CLI installed: vercel -v should return 21.0.1. If not, update with npm i -g vercel.

[bigsee]

@aryanbeezadhur thank you for your helpful response. I am aware that some of the fields are deprecated and need updating soon: name and version should not affect the deployment or result in the behaviour I'm seeing though, unless I'm missing something?

With regard to alias, to my knowledge, while it is recommended to use the project settings, my use case meant I needed custom domains for different environments (e.g. staging.mysite.com). And aliases were the only obvious way to achieve this without the Github integration, which had a bug that I reported, which broke my deployments until I removed it.

routes is another case entirely. I see that this is no longer the recommended approach for the use case I had. However, I also see that it is not deprecated. Therefore, I don't think it unreasonable to expect deployment to work as before especially since this is a simple text change.

[bigsee]

P.S. As mentioned, I also tried zero config but the same error is returned.

[paulogdm]

@bigsee Is it possible that you are deploying unwanted files, like node_modules?

[bigsee]

@paulogdm hmmm... node_modules has always been in my .gitignore. I will double-check the source...

[bigsee]

@paulogdm double-checked this: node_modules is definitely in .gitignore. I also noticed that vercel dev now seems to create a node_modules_dev folder so I added that too, with the same result.

For a while vercel dev would not work. After deleting node_modules, doing a fresh npm install and then running vercel dev, I would get the following error:

Using npm                                                                                                                                 17:06:48
ℹ Prepare build took: 2.790129 ms                                                                                                         17:06:48
 ----------------- Install devDependencies -----------------                                                                              17:06:48
Error! EPERM: operation not permitted, unlink 'node_modules'

When I delete node_modules and run vercel dev without installing beforehand, the command correctly serves the site locally.

But then running vercel gives the same result. I have a support ticket open so I will provide repo access there and post a solution here when we find it.

[GiancarlosIO]

I'm having the same error using the vercel cli 😢 .
is there a solution or explanation for this error? 😢

[lonyele]

On my local machine using vercel-cli it works fine, but on self-managed gitlab's CI, it fails.
local env. node: v16.13.0, mac os: Monterey 12.2.1,pnpm@6.30.0
self-managed gitlab ci env. node:lts-alpine, ubuntu 20.04, pnpm@6.30.0

[lonyele]

Ok... I succeeded from self-managed gitlab ci.
My guess is that the problem is the npm/pnpm cache(or it could be node_modules not sure).
Ususally npm/yarn/pnpm installed output will be put into some cache store(in my case pnpm-store) and later can be used on test, lint, deploy or whatever stage/pipeline afterward. I just tried to track down the issue and remove all pnpm cache things and it worked. I need to add cache feature any since it is very needed but yeah, it was the problem for me. Hope others can get help

[theHarisKhan]

hey! i'm facing the same issue my files say it exceed 18256,
Let me know how you resolved this issue,

[praisegeek]

I experienced this issue despite having .gitignore exclude node_modules from source. But when I added .vercelignore to my project root directory with the contents

node_modules 
.cache
.output
/build/
/public/build
/api/index.js

the error left. I believe if I had added /build and /public/build to .gitignore, it would have worked still.

[Daavidaviid]

Great! I'm using react-native-web, I needed to add all the folders like .expo, ios, android, etc

[THE-BLUE-FRIEND]

So .vercelignore does the work! It was working fine until one day when the error showed up. They should debug clearing the cache properly.

[zamgill]

This fix worked for me:

Hi @dpcdev1999, can you try vercel deploy --prebuilt --archive=tgz and let us know how it goes?

#8571 (comment)