Can't get MM to start, says it can't find electron, then electron won't start

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 MM is trying to install 4.x by default… try 3.0.10

what version is npm?

npm -v
node -v

npm install electron@3.0.10

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil npm is 6.4.1 and node is 10.15.1. When I try to install electron now it just says that my cache input stream is empty. when I tried to get to node modules like @bhepler said, it said no such file or directory, and when I force cleared it gave me a warning message saying “I sure hope you know what you are doing.”

[sdetweil]

try

npm init -y

may have to erase the /home/pi/.npm folder

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil got this, now what?

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ npm init -y
Wrote to /home/pi/package.json:

{
  "name": "pi",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {},
  "devDependencies": {},
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

[sdetweil]

now change to MagicMirror folder and try the install for electron@3.0.10

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil the pi reboots and then I change to magicmirror folder and try to start magic mirror and it still says it can’t find electron for some reason :/

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil it also says that “local package.json exists, but node_modules is missing, did you mean to install?”

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 yes

npm install

and if you still have electron missing, then try to

npm install electron@3.0.10

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil do I do npm install in pi or magic mirror?

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 magigcmirror… u are installing the dependencies for that app

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil still says

electron: not found

Could this be because it says that node_modules is missing? I did both npm install and npm install electron@3.0.10 in MagicMirror.

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 npm install from inside the magicmirror folder should have created node_modules (thats its (npm) job)

erase MagicMirror folder,
download again
and then cd MagicMirror and then npm install

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil another error, it says

npm ERR! file /home/pi/MagicMirror/package.json
npm ERR! code EJSONPARSE
npm ERR! JSON.parse Failed to parse json
npm ERR! JSON.parse Unexpected end of JSON input while parsing near ' '
npm ERR! JSON.parse Failed to parse package. json data.
npm ERR! JSON.parse package.json must be actual JSON, not just JavaScript.

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 did u download the MagicMirror folder over again?

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil yes I deleted the contents of the old folder and changed the name and redownloaded MagicMirror

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 ok, from the /home/pi folder lets start again

cd ~

rm -rf whatever_the_old_folder_name_is
rm -rf MagicMirror

git clone https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror.git

cd MagicMirror
npm install

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil okay I did all of that and it said it cloned and everthing, and then it rebooted during the install, now what? lol

[sdetweil]

@jmartin1009 should not reboot

[jmartin1009]

@sdetweil oh it reboots everytime I install magicmirror, how do I prevent this? because it always reboots like 1/3 of the way through the progress bar and it always did it so I thought it was normal lol can I stop this? I have a pi 3+ btw

[jmartin1009]

@jmartin1009 it also does that everytime I try to install electron so maybe that’s why it isn’t working :confused: is there any fix for this?