eslint: Error: Cannot find module '../lib/cli'

I am using eslint v3.3.1 with Sublime text 3 to develop my react web app. Currently I encounter an error say :

Error: Cannot find module '../lib/cli'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:455:15)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:403:25)
    at Module.require (module.js:483:17)
    at require (internal/module.js:20:19)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/Welly/Dropbox/GitHub/react-universal-starter/node_modules/.bin/eslint:29:11)
    at Module._compile (module.js:556:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:565:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:473:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:432:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:424:3)

And when I remove and re-install node_modules, this error seems to be solved, but next time I launch my code editor this error occurs again, does anyone has this problem?

Here’s my .eslintrc :

{
  "parser": "babel-eslint",
  "extends": "airbnb",
  "plugins": [
    "react"
  ],
  "env": {
    "es6": true,
    "browser": true,
    "node": true
  },
  "rules": {
    "global-require": 0,
    "no-underscore-dangle": 0,
    "no-console": 0,
    "react/jsx-filename-extension": [1, { "extensions": [".js", ".jsx"] }]
  },
  "globals": {
    "__DEV__": true,
    "webpackIsomorphicTools": true
  }
}

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Comments: 15 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Yes, it does occur with other modules. After I posted that, the same thing happened with tap. The thing is that I only use Dropbox for backup, I don’t use the syncing behavior on multiple computers, and yet Dropbox apparently destroys the symlinks even then.

Even more annoying to me after some Googling to see that Dropbox has had this issue for years and years. Ironic because a lot of their user base must be developers.

rschamp on Dec 2, 2016

This happens to me and my team occasionally — the root cause seems to be that somewhere along the line node_modules/.bin/eslint has become a real file, a copy of bin/eslint.js. Then when you run eslint, it tries to require('../lib/cli') relative to node_modules/.bin/ which crashes with this error. Uninstalling and reinstalling eslint fixes the issue, as it fixes .bin/eslint to be a symlink again, but I wonder if some combination of dependencies causes this to happen?

This just happened to me while working on this repo (i.e. running npm install and npm test there): https://github.com/LLK/eslint-config-scratch. I’m using npm v3.10.8.

rschamp on Nov 24, 2016

The point is that Dropbox doesn’t properly sync symlinks. So if npm install has been executed on computer A and computer B receives node_modules via Dropbox, then computer B will end up with a broken node_modules folder where symlinks have been replaced with regular copies.

This doesn’t happen with ESLint only, it impacts every Node.js module which provides at least one executable which relies on relative paths.

Possible solutions:

delete such modules only (e.g., rm -fr node_modules/eslint) then npm install again;
manually symlink the executables (e.g., ln -s ../eslint/bin/eslint.js node_modules/.bin/eslint).

This thing is incredibly annoying…

cyrus-and on Dec 2, 2016