Tyler Butler

Node.js On Windows 8.1

This afternoon I installed Node.js version 0.10.30 (the most recent according to https://nodejs.org/) on a new Windows box. Unfortunately, after installing, using npm was, uhhh, not good:

Terminal window
C:\Users\tyler> npm
Error: ENOENT, stat 'C:\Users\tyler\AppData\Roaming\npm'

Not exactly a great experience. And that error message? Useless. To me, anyway. I’m sure ENOENT means something useful to someone.1

Fortunately, a quick search revealed this page on Stack Overflow, where the ‘fix’ is outlined: you just need to manually create the npm folder at the path in the error message:

Terminal window
C:\Users\tylerbu> mkdir C:\Users\tylerbu\AppData\Roaming\npm




Directory: C:\Users\tylerbu\AppData\Roaming




Mode        LastWriteTime    Length    Name
----        -------------    ------    ----
d----        8/15/2014      1:25 PM    npm

After that, things were golden:

Terminal window
C:\Users\tylerbu> npm install grunt
[email protected] node_modules\grunt
├── [email protected]-1.2.3
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── grunt-legacy-[email protected]
├── exit@0.1.2
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected] ([email protected])
├── coffee-[email protected]
├── iconv-[email protected]
├── [email protected]
├── [email protected] ([email protected], lru-[email protected])
├── [email protected] ([email protected], graceful-[email protected])
├── findup-[email protected] ([email protected], [email protected])
├── grunt-legacy-[email protected] ([email protected], [email protected])
└── js-[email protected] ([email protected], [email protected])

Footnotes

  1. On the plus side, the ENOENT string did help me find help on the web more quickly. So, maybe not so bad after all?

#node.js