debugging - How do I debug "Error: spawn ENOENT" on node.js?

Question

When I get the following error:

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: spawn ENOENT
    at errnoException (child_process.js:1000:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:791:34)

What procedure can I follow to fix it?

Author note: Lots of issues with this error encouraged me to post this question for future references.

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Answer 1

NOTE: This error is almost always caused because the command does not exist, because the working directory does not exist, or from a windows-only bug.

I found a particular easy way to get the idea of the root cause of:

Error: spawn ENOENT

The problem of this error is, there is really little information in the error message to tell you where the call site is, i.e. which executable/command is not found, especially when you have a large code base where there are a lot of spawn calls. On the other hand, if we know the exact command that cause the error then we can follow @laconbass' answer to fix the problem.

I found a very easy way to spot which command cause the problem rather than adding event listeners everywhere in your code as suggested in @laconbass' answer. The key idea is to wrap the original spawn call with a wrapper which prints the arguments send to the spawn call.

Here is the wrapper function, put it at the top of the index.js or whatever your server's starting script.

(function() {
    var childProcess = require("child_process");
    var oldSpawn = childProcess.spawn;
    function mySpawn() {
        console.log('spawn called');
        console.log(arguments);
        var result = oldSpawn.apply(this, arguments);
        return result;
    }
    childProcess.spawn = mySpawn;
})();

Then the next time you run your application, before the uncaught exception's message you will see something like that:

spawn called
{ '0': 'hg',
  '1': [],
  '2':
   { cwd: '/* omitted */',
     env: { IP: '0.0.0.0' },
     args: [] } }

In this way you can easily know which command actually is executed and then you can find out why nodejs cannot find the executable to fix the problem.