ionic serve Cannot read property 'hasOwnProperty' of undefined (CLI v2.1.7)

Question

New project just installed by ionic (following instructions on ionic's site) on macOs Sierra. When I try to run ionic serve it fails with this error:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'hasOwnProperty' of undefined
    at Object.runr (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/lib/cli.js:191:19)
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/lib/cli.js:54:9
    at _fulfilled (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/node_modules/q/q.js:787:54)
    at self.promiseDispatch.done (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/node_modules/q/q.js:816:30)
    at Promise.promise.promiseDispatch (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/node_modules/q/q.js:749:13)
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/node_modules/q/q.js:557:44
    at flush (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic/node_modules/q/q.js:108:17)
    at doNTCallback0 (node.js:419:9)
    at process._tickCallback (node.js:348:13)


Cannot read property 'hasOwnProperty' of undefined (CLI v2.1.7)

Your system information:

Cordova CLI: 5.4.1 
Ionic CLI Version: 2.1.7
Ionic App Lib Version: 2.1.4
ios-deploy version: 1.9.0 
ios-sim version: 5.0.11 
OS: macOS Sierra
Node Version: v4.2.4
Xcode version: Xcode 8.0 Build version 8A218a

I have uninstalled and reinstalled ionic but still getting same error. I was not getting any issues when using OS-X 10.9.

Answer 1

Ionic (CLI) 2.1.7 seems to be unstable. Try reinstalling ionic 2.0.0:

 npm uninstall -g ionic

 npm install -g [email protected]

Answer 2

npm uninstall -g ionic

npm install -g [email protected]

2.1.8 FIX IT!

see https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-cli/commit/3fde646

Answer 3

As of ionic version 2.2.X the issue still exists if you try to serve an old app. Solution: create a file package.json with an empty object - { }, and place it in the root folder (by side of the www folder).