CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jswindowsnpm
Bruno
Bruno

Reputation: 4665

Trying to launch my node.js program with npm but nothing happens

I am trying to make this slack bot run : https://github.com/lmammino/norrisbot

I am not very skilled with npm and node yet, but I follow his instructions and try to run the bot with the help of the npm start command.

Here's the output I get :

F:\norrisbot>npm start

> [email protected] start F:\norrisbot
> node bin/bot.js


F:\norrisbot>

No error, but nothing happens either in the console or the slack general channel...

By the way I set up my BOT_API_KEY variable correctly (with the token.js method)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 719

Answers (1)

Chad Robinson
Chad Robinson

Reputation: 4623

By your command prompt it's clear you're running in Windows. The operations for running Node properly in Windows are different in several ways from Mac/Linux, and a LOT (most?) of developers don't address these because they're on Mac/Linux themselves. Path formats, file locations, how you expose environment variables, and all sorts of things are different in Win.

Try hand-editing bin/bot.js in your locally cloned copy of the repo. Find this line at the end of the file:

norrisbot.run();

Change it to read as follows:

console.log('Running Norris Bot');
norrisbot.run();
console.log('Ran Norris Bot');

I bet you will find that either NEITHER of these lines gets printed, or only one does.

If NEITHER line gets printed, the issue is with the npm command improperly formatting the path to the executable script for Windows users. In that case, try running it as (make sure NodeJS is in your PATH):

 node bin/bot.js

If only the FIRST line gets printed, there is almost certainly a bug elsewhere in the module itself. I didn't evaluate all of its code, and I'm not on Windows myself at the moment - I just use it often enough to be aware of its differences. But either way it will get you started on finding the issue, and if it's truly a bug, you can pursue the bug report I see you've already filed in Github.

Upvotes: 1

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