The other night I downloaded a fresh install of Laravel 5.4 using Homestead as my development server and quickly hit upon issues running Mix, Laravel’s Webpack API. Running npm run dev was throwing the following error:-
Error: Cannot find module ‘/home/vagrant/Code/example.app/node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js’
The problem turned out to be in Laravel’s default package.json file as the scripts part was pointing at the wrong paths for cross-env.js:-
"scripts": {
"dev": "node node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"watch": "node node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --watch --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"watch-poll": "node node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --watch --watch-poll --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"hot": "node node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack-dev-server/bin/webpack-dev-server.js --inline --hot --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"production": "node node_modules/cross-env/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=production node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js"
},The fix thankfully turned out to be simple; the cross-env.js script that’s part of the cross-env package is no longer in the bin directory, but instead in dist/bin (deduced by looking at the package in node_modules). So to correct this the paths just needed correcting in packages.json:-
"scripts": {
"dev": "node node_modules/cross-env/dist/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"watch": "node node_modules/cross-env/dist/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --watch --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"watch-poll": "node node_modules/cross-env/dist/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --watch --watch-poll --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"hot": "node node_modules/cross-env/dist/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=development node_modules/webpack-dev-server/bin/webpack-dev-server.js --inline --hot --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js",
"production": "node node_modules/cross-env/dist/bin/cross-env.js NODE_ENV=production node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js --progress --hide-modules --config=node_modules/laravel-mix/setup/webpack.config.js"
},A bit frustrating when you’ve only just installed Laravel to discover Mix is broken before you have even got started, but thankfully easy to correct. I hope that by sharing this here it might help others stumbling on the same issue.