Borislav Hadzhiev
Sun Feb 27 2022·2 min read
Photo by Thomas Kelley
To solve the error "webpack-dev-server: command not found", install the
package globally by running npm install -g webpack-dev-server
and restart your
terminal. If the command fails, run it with sudo
and make sure the correct
PATH is set in your system's environment variable.
Open your terminal and install webpack-dev-server globally by running the following command.
# 👇️ install webpack-dev-server globally npm install -g webpack-dev-server # 👇️ install webpack-dev-server locally to your project npm install webpack-dev-server --save-dev
webpack-dev-server
fails, you might have to run the command prefixed with sudo
.# 👇️ if you got permissions error npm install -g webpack-dev-server
Alternatively, you can open your terminal in the directory where your
webpack.config.js
file is and run the command npx webpack serve
.
npx webpack serve --config webpack.config.js
If that doesn't help, run the following command:
npm config get prefix
The command will show you the path where npm
puts your globally installed
packages. The global packages will be in the bin
directory at the specified
path.
Look at the PATH environment variable on your operating system and add the
path that the npm config get prefix
command outputs, if it's not already
there.
If that didn't work, try to add the path to the bin
folder (from
npm config get prefix
) to your PATH environment variable and restart your
terminal.
For example, on macOS, you can update your path with the following command:
# make sure path matches with npm config get prefix export PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH
And on Windows, the output of the npm config get prefix
command will look
something like: C:\Users\Your_User_Name\AppData\Roaming\npm
.
Edit the environment variable on your machine and add the specified path (replacing the placeholder with your username).
If you are on linux, you can add the output from the npm config get prefix
command to your .bashrc
file.
# 👇️ make sure to update the path with the output # from the command export PATH="/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH"
If that doesn't help try to reinstall Node.js on your machine and then install
webpack-dev-server globally by running npm install -g webpack-dev-server
.
# 👇️ install webpack-dev-server globally npm install -g webpack-dev-server
webpack-dev-server
fails, you might have to run the command prefixed with sudo
.# 👇️ if you got permissions error sudo npm install -g webpack-dev-server
Alternatively, you can see how you can fix the permissions error on this page in the official npm docs.