gulp integration in Visual Studio 2017 not working

Question

I'm attempting to get gulp integration into Visual Studio 2017. It's working on the command line. The Task Runner Explorer in VS2017 is telling me Failed to load. See output window.

The Output Window is telling me the following:

Failed to run "<ProjectPath>\Gulpfile.js"...
cmd.exe /c gulp --tasks-simple
<ProjectPath>\node_modules\node-sass\lib\binding.js:15
      throw new Error(errors.missingBinary());
      ^
Error: Missing binding <ProjectPath>\node_modules\node-sass\vendor\win32-x64-47\binding.node
Node Sass could not find a binding for your current environment: Windows 64-bit with Node.js 5.x
Found bindings for the following environments:
  - Windows 64-bit with Node.js 8.x
This usually happens because your environment has changed since running `npm install`.
Run `npm rebuild node-sass --force` to build the binding for your current environment.

I attempt to run npm rebuild node-sass --force, only to be told Error: Can't find Python executable "C:\Python36\python.EXE", you can set the PYTHON env variable., which I confirmed existed.

I'm not sure how much farther I want to go down this rabbit hole. It appears to be a VS issue since everything works as expected on the command line. I'd like to get the gulp integration with VS working correctly.

Answer 1

Point your VS tools to the node installation on your path.

I can see in the error that there a version discrepancy between 5.x and 8.x - with VS likely being the older one (since it ships with pre-packaged and outdated node) and is taking execution precedence with the default setup.

I'm guessing you installed node-sass via your 8.x (external command line) instance but VS is trying to execute your gulp tasks via your VS's internal 5.x. node-sass leverages node-gyp to build a binary via installation scripts, and there will be incompatibilities across versions. In other words, this package, and many others that build binaries, are specifically tailored to the version of node it was installed against. To summarize, everything in node_modules/.bin is built against 8.x but is actually running on 5.x when you do so through Visual Studio.

Fear not, this is easily solved. Check out this answer for some historical context on this long running issue that many face. Basically, you want $(PATH) to be at the top of this list so your OS installation is always used...

Once you do this (just to be safe) - blow away node_modules, reinstall, and happy coding. VS really needs to stop shipping with pinned versions of node...