Node error npm ERR! cb() never called

Question

When I am running the command npm install npm@latest -g I am getting below error :-

npm WARN tar zlib error: unexpected end of file
npm ERR! cb() never called!

npm ERR! This is an error with npm itself. Please report this error at:
npm ERR!     <https://github.com/npm/npm/issues>

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     C:\Users\dk\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache\_logs\2018-04-10T03_25_52_880Z-debug.log

i googled it and tried so many things,nothing worked.

Answer 1

To anyone stumbling upon this question, if you are facing the same error message on npm install, then npm install --no-package-lock solved it for me.

As suggested in the referenced Github issue in Mohit Mutha's comment above, this is especially true if the command is ran in a CI/CD pipeline, or in my case, in Docker.

EDIT: Reason being is that the package-lock.json file already exists in your Docker image or CI pipeline

Full details

Answer 2

Our team encountered this error in our CI pipeline. However, the top answer of using --no-package-lock actually causes npm to also not use a present package-lock.json, which is definitely not the desired behavior for CI. Instead, using npm ci is now the recommended way to install in CI since it will use the existing package-lock (and nothing else).