npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for fsevents@1.0.14

Question

I`m trying to run this project https://github.com/Soundnode/soundnode-app after updating my minimatch version to 3.10.9, im getting this error

npm WARN optional SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: fsevents@^1.0.0 (node_modules\webpack\node_modules\watchpack\node_modules\chokidar\node_modules\fsevents): npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for fsevents@1.0.14: wanted {"os":"darwin","arch":"any"} (current: {"os":"win32","arch":"ia32"})

my configuration is Node v - 4.4.2 npm v- 3.10.9 im working on 32 bit windows OS

Answer 1

It's a warning, not an error. It occurs because fsevents is an optional dependency, used only when project is run on macOS environment (the package provides 'Native Access to Mac OS-X FSEvents').

And since you're running your project on Windows, fsevents is skipped as irrelevant.

There is a PR to fix this behaviour here: https://github.com/npm/cli/pull/169

Answer 2

This still appears to be an issue, causing package installations to be aborted with warnings about optional packages no being installed because of "Unsupported platform".

The problem relates to the "shrinkwrap" or package-lock.json which gets persisted after every package manager execution. Subsequent attempts keep failing as this file is referenced instead of package.json.

Adding these options to the npm install command should allow packages to install again.

   --no-optional argument will prevent optional dependencies from being installed.

   --no-shrinkwrap argument, which will ignore an available package lock or
                   shrinkwrap file and use the package.json instead.

   --no-package-lock argument will prevent npm from creating a package-lock.json file.

The complete command looks like this:

    npm install --no-optional --no-shrinkwrap --no-package-lock

nJoy!

Answer 3

This has been registered as an NPM issue: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/14042