Dev Setup: Issues

General Troubleshooting

If you are having a problem not listed here, jump into our dev chat and let's get it fixed and then documented here. You might want to check your versions of node, npm, and Python, and also make sure your GitHub copy of CodeCombat is up-to-date.

NPM Install

If your npm install step fails, try running these commands to install the environment more piecemeal:

npm install node-sass
npm install --ignore-scripts
bower install
npm install

Or, if you have an ENOENT error, you can try running this: npm install bower. The ENOENT error is generally about the public directory not being built. Most of the time it is just missing bower package.

Bower

If you get errors with bower not being able to clone git repositories, try cloning over https.

Sass

If Sass brings up an error about file encodings being wrong, add this to your .bash_profile:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If you only see a white screen, check to see if the first line of app.css is ERROR: Cannot load compass. If so, try either uninstalling compass (gem uninstall compass) or re-installing it if you actually need it (gem install compass --pre).

If you get a white screen on http://localhost:3000 with no JavaScript errors, or if your page loads fine but no CSS is applied, it could be that your brunch isn't compiling Sass properly (public\stylesheets\app.css is like 70KB instead of >600KB). We don't know of any current issues that are causing this, or workarounds, but it has been a common symptom in the past with different Sass compilation setups, especially on Windows.

fatal error: 'utility' file not found

This error occurs after upgrading to Mac OS 10.14. It may happen because you don't have the most recent version of XCode Command Line Tools installed.

Download Command Line Tools (macOS 10.14) from downloads for apple developers. Install the tools. Restart the terminal. Delete the .node-gyp folder from your root directory as well as your node_modules folder.

Then install it piecemeal as shown above.

This partial solution was found from this stack overflow thread.

At this point if you're still getting the error, check your 'MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET' version in your /Users/<USERNAME>/.node-gyp/6.12.2/include/node/common.gypi file. You may need to manually change the version to your MacOS version which was (e.g. 10.14).