Troubleshoot webhint installation and runtime issues

This topic contains the most common issues reported by users along with potential fixes. If you encounter an undocumented error, please open an issue on GitHub.

NOTE: webhint is supported on the most recent LTS and Current version of Node.js. You should use the x64 version of webhint.

Windows Subsystem Linux

If you choose to use Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) to build your packages, you may receive errors related to the following binary packages.

• canvas
• iltorb

You may receive an error similar to the following example.

Info looking for cached prebuild @ /home/mahome/.npm/_prebuilds/47fbee-iltorb-v2.4.3-node-v59-linux-x64.tar.gz
WARN install No prebuilt binaries found (target=9.10.0 runtime=node arch=x64 libc= platform=linux)
gyp ERR! build error
gyp ERR! stack Error: not found: make

To resolve this error, you must install the prerequisites of the packages.

IMPORTANT: You should not use WSL to run webhint due to the dependency on Puppeteer.

To enable webhint to run on WSL, add the following code snippet to your .hintrc file.

{ "extends": ["web-recommended"], "connector": "jsdom" }

To run webhint with a configuration (.hintrc) file without installing it, run the following command.

npx hint -c ./path/to/.hintrc https://example.com

Building Windows packages

You may receive the following error depending on the settings of your development environment or if there was a problem downloading any of the pre-compiled native modules of webhint.

gyp ERR! stack Error: Can't find Python executable "python"

Recent versions of Node.js (version 10 or later) on Windows display a prompt for you to install any required dependencies.

Alternatively, you may manually install the windows-build-tools.

1. In an Elevated PowerShell prompt, run the command in the following code snippet.

   npm install --global windows-build-tools

Issues with canvas

Starting with connector-jsdom v1.1.0, canvas is now an optional dependency. You may receive some issues during the installation if the binary is not available for download, but the overall process should finish running and you should be able to run webhint using the jsdom connector. The only caveat is images are not downloaded.

The following circumstances are more likely to cause errors.

• A new release of Node.js is available, but pre-compiled binaries for canvas are not yet available.
• You are running the x86 version of Node.js on Windows. To fix the error, you should switch to x64 since x86 binaries may not be published any time soon.

If you want to compile canvas, go to Compiling.

Permission issues during installation

If you receive an EACCES permission error while you install webhint, your project may not have webhint installed as a devDependency.

1. To install webhint as a devDependency for your project, run the following command:

   npm install hint --save-dev

If you are not able to install webhint as a devDependency, change the default directory for npm . After changing the the default directory, try to install it again.

For more information about how to change the npm default directory, go to Manually change the npm default directory .

According to npm documentation, if you have Node.js installed using a package manager like Homebrew or nvm, you may may not have to change the directories because you have the correct default permissions.

hint-cli Missing Browser Error

If you receive an error related to a missing browser you may not have a suitable Chromium based browser installed.

hint-cli will check for an installation of Chrome, Chromium, or Edge, in that order, dependent on your operating system, to run the tests.