Get a Mac! Kidding. (I actually think Microsoft has been more innovative lately.)

Run the flag –no-bin-links when you install anything with npm and it will fix your issue.

I have a dev Vagrant that I share with my team. I tend to mock things up when I’m playing around at home in the evenings. I work on a Mac at home. So when I confidently came into work with the plan to set up a box for my team to work on, I lost a bunch of time trying to figure out why the npm development tools I wanted, would not install.

According to the npm documentation:

The –no-bin-links argument will prevent npm from creating symlinks for any binaries the package might contain.

Why? I found this discussion on the Vagrant github:

…there is a fundamental problem with using Vagrant + VMWare Workstation + Windows + Linux VMs…

It seems that VMWare on Windows simply does not support the ability to create a Linux symlink in a shared folder.

Another option is to set bin-links to false in your global npm configuration: npm config set bin-links false

This will mean that you won’t have to type in the flag –no-bin-links each time, which might be a good solution if you are trying to build development tools to make your team’s lives easier.

About the image: Grand Central Station, NYC