"The package "esbuild-linux-64" could not be found, and is needed by esbuild."

[andyburke]

We are using SvelteKit, which uses Vite, which uses esbuild and we are seeing this error on some of our macs.

We also have devs on linux who are not having this issue.

I was able to find this, but it's closed with little to no explanation: vitejs/vite#5187

Could this be caused by installing things on a linux machine, package-lock.json gets some notions, and then it's a problem on other platforms? Is something else going on? Happy to be pointed in another direction if this isn't specifically an esbuild issue.

npm ls output from my linux machine indicates the following versions:

─┬ vite@2.6.14
  ├── esbuild@0.13.15 deduped

[evanw]

Do you have an steps that can be followed to reproduce this issue?

[andyburke]

Unfortunately, this is a difficult one to figure out a repro on.

I am suspicious it would read like:

1. Install esbuild (or have esbuild installed as a dependency) while on a linux machine
2. Try to npm install things on a mac
3. Try to run esbuild on the mac and observe it complains about missing esbuild-linux-64

I can try to create a bare project on linux and point people at it, but I can't easily test this on a mac myself.

[andyburke]

I created the most basic setup I could here: https://github.com/andyburke/esbuild-bug-linux-mac

I'll try to ask a colleague with a mac to pull and test it to see if they can repro the problem. If anyone here has a mac, maybe they could try as well.

[netaisllc]

Yeah, so pulling the most basic setup on a Mac and building the project fails to repro the issue.

The darwin version is installed as expected.

[evanw]

Ok, good to know. Marking this as unactionable for now since there's nothing I can do about this issue at the moment. I am awaiting further input from someone who has a reproduction. It would still be good to get to the bottom of this as it may for example turn out to be a bug in npm that can be fixed. Once we have reproduction steps we can also see what happens with pnpm/yarn as well.

[xd-shadow]

Just installed Node in WSL and encountered the same problem

[evanw]

Just saying +1 to this issue without providing specific reproduction instructions isn't adding any additional information. Please provide specific end-to-end instructions for how to reproduce the issue.

[silvenon]

I'm getting the same error when running esbuild on Vercel in a serverless function. In vercel/vercel#7287 I linked to my repository along with the deployment showing the error, but the complication is that the problem isn't happening locally, only in the deployment, so I'm not sure where it goes wrong and how to go about debugging it. It's probably a question for them, but I thought that cross-linking this issue couldn't hurt.

[geoffharcourt]

I experienced this issue in some situations where we had a Yarn cache from gems installed on the wrong CPU architecture (Docker images built on a Mac with Apple Silicon then pushed up to run on Linux on x86). In every instance we encountered this, it was because we had shared node_modules between machines of different architectures (so had the wrong architecture-specific package installed). We're using Yarn and not NPM, so I'm not sure if the results will be different. When we ran yarn install from the proper architecture to start with we were unable to recreate this.

[andyburke]

This could make sense, we run our containers on linux images, but for development we mount our local filesystems into the containers, sometimes those local filesystems are running on Mac, for instance.

Is there some way to have ESBuild install for multiple platforms somehow?

[zdenekgebauer]

I'm geting this error in linux based docker image. Even after npm i esbuild-linux-64

[evanw]

I'm going to try improving the error message in the situation where you have installed esbuild for a different platform than the one you're currently on. The error message I added looks like this:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/esbuild
./node_modules/esbuild/bin/esbuild:106
          throw new Error(`
          ^

Error:
You installed esbuild on another platform than the one you're currently using.
This won't work because esbuild is written with native code and needs to
install a platform-specific binary executable.

Specifically the "esbuild-linux-arm64" package is present but this platform
needs the "esbuild-darwin-arm64" package instead. People often get into this
situation by installing esbuild on Windows or macOS and copying "node_modules"
into a Docker image that runs Linux, or by copying "node_modules" between
Windows and WSL environments.

If you are installing with npm, you can try not copying the "node_modules"
directory when you copy the files over, and running "npm ci" or "npm install"
on the destination platform after the copy. Or you could consider using yarn
instead which has built-in support for installing a package on multiple
platforms simultaneously.

If you are installing with yarn, you can try listing both this platform and the
other platform in your ".yarnrc.yml" file using the "supportedArchitectures"
feature: https://yarnpkg.com/configuration/yarnrc/#supportedArchitectures
Keep in mind that this means multiple copies of esbuild will be present.

Another alternative is to use the "esbuild-wasm" package instead, which works
the same way on all platforms. But it comes with a heavy performance cost and
can sometimes be 10x slower than the "esbuild" package, so you may also not
want to do that.

    at generateBinPath (./node_modules/esbuild/bin/esbuild:106:17)
    at Object.<anonymous> (./node_modules/esbuild/bin/esbuild:161:39)
    at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1101:14)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1153:10)
    at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:981:32)
    at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:822:12)
    at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:81:12)
    at node:internal/main/run_main_module:17:47

Edit: And it's also now documented on the website too: https://esbuild.github.io/getting-started/#simultaneous-platforms

[evanw]

I'm going to close this issue because it has been marked as unactionable for a while and specific steps to reproduce the issue from scratch haven't been provided. This issue can definitely be reproduced by copying a node_modules folder from one OS to another without reinstalling, but your not supposed to do that. There should now be a specific error message when that happens with workarounds and workarounds are also described on the website. It's unclear if this is what's happening in all of these cases or if something is going on in other cases, but we won't know unless specific reproduction steps are provided for the other cases. I think these are probably best filed as new issues instead.