Local package.json exists, but node_modules missing

Question

I am trying to start a Redux application I just cloned from a GitHub repository.

I tried to run it with the following command

npm start 

I am getting this error

> [email protected] start /home/workspace/assignment > webpack-dev-server --config ./configs/webpack/webpack.config.development.js  sh: 1: webpack-dev-server: not found npm ERR! file sh npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE npm ERR! errno ENOENT npm ERR! syscall spawn npm ERR! [email protected] start: `webpack-dev-server --config ./configs/webpack/webpack.config.development.js` npm ERR! spawn ENOENT npm ERR!  npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] start script. npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above. npm WARN Local package.json exists, but node_modules missing, did you mean to install?  npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in: npm ERR!     /home/.npm/_logs/2018-05-15T16_32_44_571Z-debug.log 

Any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

npm start runs a script that the app maker built for easy starting of the app npm install installs all the packages in package.json

run npm install first

then run npm start

Answer 2

Just had the same error message, but when I was running a package.json with:

"scripts": {     "build": "tsc -p ./src", } 

tsc is the command to run the TypeScript compiler.

I never had any issues with this project because I had TypeScript installed as a global module. As this project didn't include TypeScript as a dev dependency (and expected it to be installed as global), I had the error when testing in another machine (without TypeScript) and running npm install didn't fix the problem. So I had to include TypeScript as a dev dependency (npm install typescript --save-dev) to solve the problem.