LESS in Web Compiler for Visual Studio 2019 stopped to work

Question

It worked for years. Yesterday for no reason (?) I'm not able to compile LESS files any more. I tried to

• reinstall the Web Compiler extension,
• reinstall Web Essentials 2019 extension,
• reinstall the whole Visual Studio 2019 for 3 times,
• start a new project from scratch

I do not know if some automatic update happened under the hoods, but basically, every time I try to compile a LESS file I get:

module.js:471
    throw err;
    ^

Error: Cannot find module 'C:\Users\igor\AppData\Local\Temp\WebCompiler1.12.394\node_modules\less\bin\lessc'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:469:15)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:417:25)
    at Module.runMain (module.js:604:10)
    at run (bootstrap_node.js:390:7)
    at startup (bootstrap_node.js:150:9)
    at bootstrap_node.js:505:3

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I deleted the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\WebCompiler1.12.394 folder and ran the compilation from Task Runner Explorer which recreated the folder without having to reinstall Web Compiler.

Maybe it is related to also having the BuildWebCompiler 1.12.405 NuGet package installed in the project.