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While running a node app with Docker, there is an error 137:

The command '/bin/sh -c npm install' returned a non-zero code: 137

This means a out of memory error.

To fix, you can add more RAM.

Or you can add more swap memory (FREE!). Swap memory uses part of your harddisk for temporary memory.

These steps are exactly the same from a previous guide:

# Confirm you have no swap
sudo swapon -s

# Allocate 1GB (or more if you wish) in /swapfile
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile

# Make it secure
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
ls -lh /swapfile

# Activate it
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

# Confirm again there's indeed more memory now
free -m
sudo swapon -s

# Configure fstab to use swap when instance restart
sudo nano /etc/fstab

# Add this line to /etc/fstab, save and exit
/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0

# Change swappiness to 10, so that swap is used only when 10% RAM is unused
# The default is too high at 60
echo 10 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
echo vm.swappiness = 10 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf