“Attribute 'program' does not exist” for basic node.js project

Question

I created simple node.js application (source code from here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-studio-code-and-azure-app-service-a-perfect-fit/)

var h         


        

Answer 1

Another issue I ran into is a path was configured Using\\Backslashes\\Like\\So and worked fine on Windows, but on Mac it gave the above error.

(Solution: changed to /)

Answer 2

The error should ideally read 'file specified in program attribute does not exist' because that is what is happening. As of VSCode 1.30.2, it does show you the path along with the error.

In my case I had "program": "${workspaceFolder}\\${file}" so the path was something like c:\dir\c:\dir\file.js

I corrected this by removing ${workspaceFolder} since I wanted to be able to debug individual files.

Answer 3

I had the same error, because I was passing the arguments inside "program" attribute like this:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Build -B -p",
            "skipFiles": [
                "<node_internals>/**"
            ],
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}\\app\\build -B -p D:\\apps\\12"
        }
    ]
}

What solved for me was to pass the arguments inside "args" attribute, like this:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Build -B -p",
            "skipFiles": [
                "<node_internals>/**"
            ],
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}\\app\\build",
            "args":["-B", "-pD:\\apps\\12"]
        }
    ]
}

The O.S. was Windows 7.

Answer 4

I had the same question and took me couple of hours to figure it out. What I basically did was that I deleted the folder after ${workspaceFolder}

The format was ${workspaceFolder}/xxxx\\folder\\subfolder\\subfolder so by deleting what's after the "workspaceFolder" and starting my path from the double backward slash, it did fix it for me.

Answer 5

For the ones who are using Visual Studio 2019, today I was trying Node.js in the "master" VS2019. I moved server.ts to the src folder so that my js output would be in lib folder.

After that I tarted getting that message. Here are the changes I made in my project file to have it working.

<StartupFile>lib\server.js</StartupFile>
<WorkingDirectory>lib</WorkingDirectory>
<OutputPath>lib</OutputPath>

I hope this is not out of topic, it could help VS IDE users.

Answer 6

It simply means that when you debug the file the app.js file simply doesn't exist and when you perform debugging it shows the error. Here it my way to fix the problem : simply replace the value of program

"${workspaceRoot}/app.js"

by

"${workspaceFolder}/${fileBasenameNoExtension}.js"

I hope this will solve all of your problems.