npm install gets stuck at fetchMetadata

Question

I'm currently unable to run npm install in any project since today. I'm running node v8.2.1 & npm 5.3.0 (installed via nvm).

When typing npm install it gets stuck on fetchMetadata everytime: ⸨ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░⸩ ⠧ fetchMetadata: sill pacote range manifest for longest@^1.0.1 fetched in 197ms

I've tried switching back to npm 5.0.3 which worked flawless, but still get stuck.

Details to my computer: MacBook Pro running macOS 10.12.6

Answer 1

This is how I resolved this after spending half an hour:

1. npm config set registry http://registry.npmjs.org/ --global
2. npm cache clear --force
3. setting package-lock.json to {} only
4. npm install --verbose

node: v12.14.1 npm: v6.13.4

This issue occure when I tried running ng update on angular 6 app to update it to angular 9.

Answer 2

As a first thing, run npm install --verbose to see more!

What happened in my case:

In your package.json search for packages you directly get from Github. In my case such a package did not exist anymore. Such lines look like

"NAME_OF_PACKAGE": "git+ssh://[email protected]/SOME_USER/NAME_OF_PACKAGE.git", 

Remove the package, fix the name/location or change to the npm version of the package.

---

Further note: I got several other similar errors, all the same but the package name was different from longest@^1.0.1. I also had p-try@something or array-ify@something

---

For me all that didn't work: rm -rf ~/.npm, npm cache clean or rm package-lock.json all didn't work!