When npm tells you you're hosed

There may be a problem with a package you are using, not npm itself. Sigh. Deep breath. Grunt. Okay - time to wipe the node_modules and start again.

Reasons aside, for now, there are a few commands I seem to run almost daily to try to recover from errors. Kelly Vaughn got me thinking this morning about this from her post on Twitter

if at first you don't succeed, try `rm -rf node_modules && npm install`

— Kelly Vaughn 🐞 (@kvlly) April 22, 2019

There are a few contributing factors to me running into issues with npm packages.

1. I manage a lot of code, including some just infrequent enough where the packages get stale.
2. I work in coffee shops and poor WiFi areas quite often
3. Murphy's Law surrounds me

So what do I do when I see one of the issues with my npm packages? Especially the ones that claim there may be something wrong with one of the packages and not npm itself? I clear the node_modules folder and try again.

rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json
npm install

And to do it with flair, I created a bash alias to run these commands.

npm-wipe
npm i

Why run it in two commands? Mostly because I like to see that the first one completed then go run npm install manually. I have no good reason. You may prefer to run it all at once.

Bash Alias

Here is how I set up my bash alias on my macOS.

alias npm-wipe="rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json"

Hope this helps you out of a bind once in a while, too!