Error with vue/cli installation on windows

Question

I am trying to install vue/cli using npm on powershell on windows 10. The installation fails with the following error.

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> npm install -g @vue/cli
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: request has been deprecated, see https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: this library is no longer supported
npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: fsevents 1 will break on node v14+ and could be using insecure binaries. Upgrade to fsevents 2.

> [email protected] preinstall C:\Program Files\nodejs\node_modules\@vue\cli\node_modules\yarn
> :; (node ./preinstall.js > /dev/null 2>&1 || true)

At line:1 char:43
+ :; (node ./preinstall.js > /dev/null 2>&1 || true)
+                                           ~~
The token '||' is not a valid statement separator in this version.
    + CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidEndOfLine

npm WARN optional SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: fsevents@^1.2.7 (node_modules\@vue\cli\node_modules\chokidar\node_modules\fsevents):
npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for [email protected]: wanted {"os":"darwin","arch":"any"} (current: {"os":"win32","arch":"x64"})
npm WARN @vue/[email protected] requires a peer of [email protected] but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! [email protected] preinstall: `:; (node ./preinstall.js > /dev/null 2>&1 || true)`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] preinstall script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache\_logs\2020-09-29T17_51_11_839Z-debug.log

I am using node version 12.18.4

How to fix this issue?

Answer 1

It seems the 1.22.10 version of yarn will have problems on windows when node was installed as root. You could try 1.22.5 and see if that fixes it

https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#12210-and-prior

Answer 2

This bug seems to be in some versions of NPM as recent as 1.22.7.

I saw some discussion related to this bug here: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/8358

Updating NPM itself with the sudo prefix solves the issue for me (on Ubuntu). Strangely enough, the environment I was running this from was a root account.

sudo npm install -g npm

Then, installing yarn with the sudo prefix fixes my install:

sudo npm install -g yarn

I presume this is a bug on older versions of NPM or yarn. By using NPM to update itself, you can get the latest version of NPM, which likely has the latest version of yarn.