Computers are not unlike petulant, whiny little children. If they come across something not to their liking, they throw their hands up in the air, stop working and loudly announce their discontent to everyone.

I’m always reminded of this when I forget some little detail and stuff simply does not work anymore.

Last week, I encountered one of these situations and decided to write it down. Maybe this will save some time for someone else who also runs into this.

The project

I’m working on a small hobby project where we want to compare energy usage between homes in our neighborhood. I wanted to present some collected data as an interactive graph hosted on the web where everyone can access it. Like I said, this is a hobby project so I did not want to use a complicated hosting solution.

So I decided to write this using Blazor and specifically Webassembly. This would allow me to build something that I can simply host on a static site. Something like Github pages.

I developed this on Windows and when I had something that I wanted to share, I wrote a Github action to build and publish it onto a Github page. This way I could easily update it locally, push it onto Github and build and deployment would be automated.

‘The file contained different line endings than formatting it would result in.’

During compilation on Github however, the process stopped with the above error message. Unexpected, compilation works fine locally. The message mentions something about line endings.

Windows and Linux use different line-endings. Windows uses CRLF (Carriage Return, Line Feed). Linux uses LF only.

I develop locally on my Windows desktop (CRLF) and the Github action compiles using an Ubuntu Linux distribution (LF). It looked like my files still contained the Windows style line-endings during the compilation process on Linux.

But why? Normally this stuff is handled for you by Git using the core.autocrlf setting. This ensures that in the Git repository line endings are stored in Unix style but when checking out they are converted to the correct setting for the platform.

The solution

Finally, I decided to have a look at everything in my project that could contain global configuration. Eventually, I looked at my .editorconfig and found this:

end_of_line = crlf

During compilation on Ubuntu, this setting forces line-endings to be converted to CRLF resulting in the earlier mentioned error message. Removing this line solved the problem.

To be honest, I have no idea why I had put this in the configuration file. I suspect that I simply copied an existing .editorconfig file from another project.

Lesson learned: understand what each setting does and don’t blindly copy from other projects.

The result

Now i could finally deploy the project succesfully. You can see the end result here.

Use the code n5lvbv to get access.