Bad/misleasing error message if project has no functions

[ThomasEg]

Just spent half a day tracking this issue down, so i thought that maybe someone else might find this usefull on Google.... and it is something that should be fixed IMO...

I started on a new and small project, where we needed a bit of infrastructure(S3 bucket) and a single function. I thought "i'll start with the bucket and then add the function in step two".... but...that sent me down a rabbit hole tracking down a strange error...

First, here is the error i got when i tried to deploy my new service:

  Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat 'C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\.build\.serverless'
      at PluginManager.invoke (C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\serverless\lib\classes\PluginManager.js:490:22)
      at PluginManager.spawn (C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\serverless\lib\classes\PluginManager.js:510:17)
      at Deploy.BbPromise.bind.then (C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\serverless\lib\plugins\deploy\deploy.js:115:50)

...followed by this on the next attempts at the deployment:

  Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, unlink 'C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\.build\node_modules'
      at Object.unlinkSync (fs.js:956:3)
      at TypeScriptPlugin.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\src\index.ts:195:12)
      at Generator.next (<anonymous>)
      at C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\dist\src\index.js:7:71
      at new Promise (<anonymous>)
      at __awaiter (C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\dist\src\index.js:3:12)        
      at TypeScriptPlugin.copyDependencies (C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\dist\src\index.js:166:16)
      at TypeScriptPlugin.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\src\index.ts:45:20)
      at Generator.next (<anonymous>)
      at fulfilled (C:\Users\Thomas\Documents\GitHub\Foo\Bar\node_modules\serverless-plugin-typescript\dist\src\index.js:4:58)        
      at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:68:7)

...so.... i tried all solutions i could find: clearing node_modules and deleting all ".whatever" directories... i also tried cleaning up my global NPM packages to no avail...

The only way i could get it to deploy was by removing the "serverless-plugin-typescript"-plugin from the "plugins"-section of serverless.yml...

However, if you add a function to the project, everything works!

So this bugreport is to do two things:

• If you came here via google because of similar errors, make sure that you have functions for the plugin! It could be that you wanted to deploy first without code or that you might have misspelled something in the yml file...doublecheck everything :-)
• The plugin needs to handle idiots like me who tries to deploy serverless projects without any functions. At least give a decent error/warning message...