I just bought a new Macbook with an M1 chip to work on my dating app. I got the basic Macbook Air but with 16 GB of RAM if you're wondering. I heard that there were some issues with software compatibility with software built for Intel-based Macs, but I figured all of that would have been smoothed out by now given that these Macs have been out for a full year. However, when I re-cloned the repo for this blog and ran npm install I kept getting errors. I'll tell you how I fixed it so you know what to do if this happens to you.

Before you get started, I recommend you install three things on your new Mac that should make things easier:

1. The Xcode developer tools. Run xcode-select --install.
2. Homebrew for installing command line utilities on Mac.
3. nvm for installing node, npm, and switching node versions.

Once you have that installed you should use nvm to install some version of node. I installed the latest version (17) which ended up working for me, but you may need a different version for your project. Now, cd into your project folder and run npm install. If it works, great! You can stop reading now 😄

Ok, so npm install didn't work. Now what? First I'll tell you the last thing I did, because I suspect that if I had just done that I could have skipped all the other steps.

When I was trying to debug this I was confused because when I would Google the errors I was seeing I would find it mentioned in a closed Github Issue that said the error was fixed in a new version of the package. In retrospect it seems obvious, but I was able to make all of my npm install errors go away by upgrading all of my packages to their latest version.

Here's an example of an error I was getting that went away after updating my packages:

npm ERR! code 1
npm ERR! path /Users/aj/Development/blog/node_modules/esbuild
npm ERR! command failed
npm ERR! command sh -c node install.js
npm ERR! Unsupported platform: darwin arm64 LE

Rather than figure out the latest version for each package and upgrading them one-by-one I wanted to upgrade everything to their latest version all at once.

My understanding is that this is what the npm update command does, so that might work for you, but I used a third party package called npm-check-updates instead. You can install it with npm install -g npm-check-updates (luckily npm install worked for this package 😅) and run it by just running ncu in the folder where your package.json file is or ncu -u to actually modify your package.json file.

Once my package.json file was updated with the latest version for each package I ran npm install again and everything installed without errors. In my case, I didn't even need to change any of my code – everything just worked.

So hopefully that's all you need to do, but I actually did do one other thing before I updated the packages, so I'll mention it in case you run into the same error I did even after updating your packages.

Here's the error I was getting:

npm ERR! code 1
npm ERR! path /Users/aj/Development/blog/node_modules/sharp
npm ERR! command failed
npm ERR! command sh -c (node install/libvips && node install/dll-copy && prebuild-install --runtime=napi) || (node-gyp rebuild && node install/dll-copy)
npm ERR! CC(target) Release/obj.target/nothing/../node-addon-api/nothing.o
npm ERR!   LIBTOOL-STATIC Release/nothing.a
npm ERR!   TOUCH Release/obj.target/libvips-cpp.stamp
npm ERR!   CXX(target) Release/obj.target/sharp/src/common.o
npm ERR! info sharp Downloading https://github.com/lovell/sharp-libvips/releases/download/v8.9.1/libvips-8.9.1-darwin-arm64v8.tar.gz
npm ERR! ERR! sharp Prebuilt libvips 8.9.1 binaries are not yet available for darwin-arm64v8
npm ERR! info sharp Attempting to build from source via node-gyp but this may fail due to the above error
npm ERR! info sharp Please see https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/install for required dependencies
npm ERR! gyp info it worked if it ends with ok
npm ERR! gyp info using node-gyp@8.2.0
npm ERR! gyp info using node@16.13.0 | darwin | arm64
npm ERR! gyp info find Python using Python version 3.8.9 found at "/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/python3"
npm ERR! gyp info spawn /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/python3
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args [
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/gyp_main.py',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'binding.gyp',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-f',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'make',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/Users/aj/Development/blog/node_modules/sharp/build/config.gypi',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/addon.gypi',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/Users/aj/Library/Caches/node-gyp/16.13.0/include/node/common.gypi',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dlibrary=shared_library',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dvisibility=default',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_root_dir=/Users/aj/Library/Caches/node-gyp/16.13.0',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_gyp_dir=/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_lib_file=/Users/aj/Library/Caches/node-gyp/16.13.0/<(target_arch)/node.lib',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dmodule_root_dir=/Users/aj/Development/blog/node_modules/sharp',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_engine=v8',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--depth=.',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--no-parallel',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--generator-output',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'build',
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Goutput_dir=.'
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args ]
npm ERR! gyp info spawn make
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args [ 'BUILDTYPE=Release', '-C', 'build' ]
npm ERR! warning: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/libtool: archive library: Release/nothing.a the table of contents is empty (no object file members in the library define global symbols)
npm ERR! ../src/common.cc:23:10: fatal error: 'vips/vips8' file not found
npm ERR! #include <vips/vips8>
npm ERR!          ^~~~~~~~~~~~
npm ERR! 1 error generated.
npm ERR! make: *** [Release/obj.target/sharp/src/common.o] Error 1
npm ERR! gyp ERR! build error
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack Error: `make` failed with exit code: 2
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.onExit (/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/build.js:194:23)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:390:28)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:290:12)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! System Darwin 21.1.0
npm ERR! gyp ERR! command "/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/bin/node" "/Users/aj/.nvm/versions/node/v16.13.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
npm ERR! gyp ERR! cwd /Users/aj/Development/blog/node_modules/sharp
npm ERR! gyp ERR! node -v v16.13.0
npm ERR! gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v8.2.0
npm ERR! gyp ERR! not ok

It's a little hard to parse this error message, but basically npm can't install a package called sharp which I believe is a low-level utility package. And the reason the install is failing is because "Prebuilt libvips 8.9.1 binaries are not yet available for darwin-arm64v8" and "fatal error: 'vips/vips8' file not found". When I Googled this error I found a lot of different solutions, but the one that worked for me was running brew install vips, then re-running npm install. Once I did that this error went away, but then I got the esbuild error I first mentioned. I suspect that if I had updated my packages from the get-go I wouldn't have needed to install vips at all.

If you're trying to run npm install on an M1 Mac and updating the packages doesn't fix it or you're getting different errors, I probably won't be of much help. I recommend Googling the errors you're getting to see if anyone else ran into that same error and was able to find a solution.

Hope this helped and good luck!

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