In an effort to learn React, I pulled up React’s introductory tutorial.
Almost immediately I hit turbulence.
I was in the setup of the tutorial when I got my first error message in response to executing the npm start command.
Creating a React App
Creating a brand new React app is supposed to be easy. The React team has step-by-step instructions and a tool chain that’s supposed to make this painless.
Apparently, I’m a glutton for pain, because I didn’t get a success message. Instead, I received this lovely novel-length error message:
My favorite part?
P.S. We know this message is long but please read the steps above
We hope you find them helpful!
It’s simple, but this sort of human touch absolutely makes a difference. On to the debugging!
For brevity’s sake, I will skip over steps 1-5 as they were not my actual problem.
Issue 1: Babel-Loader was globally installed
The first place where I actually seemed to have an issue was with step 6. Babel-loader was installed globally.
Uninstalling node packages is not something I do every day, so I found this StackOverflow discussion on the topic helpful.
Returning to my bash terminal, I entered $ npm -g uninstall babel-loader —save and received back up to date in .04s.
Success! Almost… babel-loader was still there in my global node_modules!
(I used $ npm -g ls to see all globally installed modules.)
Issue 2: Uninstall didn’t error, but also didn’t remove the module
It appears that only node packages that are at a depth of 0 can be uninstalled using the $ npm -g uninstall <module_name> —save command.
Lucky me – babel-loader wasn’t at that depth.
Again, returning to Stack Overflow for guidance, I found this discussion helpful.
The list of things that you can npm uninstall -g is available at npm ls -g –depth=0
To see which modules are available for uninstall, I used the command: $ nvm use system && npm ls -g --depth=0. The first half of the command was to see if babel-loader was pre-installed with my version of node (it wasn’t).
Solution: Manually remove the directories
Since npm uninstall didn’t have access to babel-loader (or user error prevented it from removing it), I decided to attack the problem head-on.
I removed the babel-loader directory from my User/Stephen/node_module directory ($ rm -rf babel-loader).
When I ran npm start again I was greeted by success!
Time to celebrate!
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