Windows containers, dockerfiles and npm

As part of my adventure with the IoTPlantWatering project, I ran into the issue of not being able to automatically launch “npm start” from within a Windows container using this command in my dockerfile, which would work just fine if this was a Linux container.

CMD [ "npm", "start"]

If I built the container without this command, connected to it interactively and typed “npm start” it worked fine. What gives? For Windows you need to use:

CMD [ "npm.cmd", "start"]

Here are a couple links that give you a little more context to why, but if nothing else, just remember – npm.CMD!

• https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_6#_launch-configuration-supports-npm-and-other-tools
• https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/2726
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40503074/how-to-run-npm-command-in-java-using-process-builder