I finally jumped back into React yesterday about a month after boot camp ended. It felt great to dive back into learning, but I was caught off guard pretty quickly when I tried to run npm start. I’ve never had this problem before, so I’m not sure what I did that brought this error up…but here we are!
I spent over an hour yesterday on Stack Overflow and Google trying to get this fixed, and nothing worked other than skipping the check. I followed the steps. I tried to uninstall webpack. I deleted node modules and package-lock.json multiple times. If it wasn’t webpack shooting errors, then it was babel. For whatever reason, the error for babel stopped coming up and it changed to webpack. It seems like a common issue, I found several articles about the topic — the .env file did work and allowed me to run the app, but I feel like that is only a temporary fix to a larger problem.
I was going in the completely wrong direction. A dev in my boot camp alumni Discord channel pointed out the obvious — you have a node modules folder directly in your user folder, is that supposed to be there?
Is it? I don’t think so. I still feel like such a beginner on this journey of learning to code and I struggle with feeling like I am asking dumb questions so I hesitated to ask in the Discord channel, but within seconds I had my question answered — and solved. I can’t be afraid to ask questions because that is where the growth happens!
In conclusion, ask questions. Take advantage of the helpful people and resources around you — asking for help is okay! I’m still pretty new to this and it’s totally worth getting a fresh pair of eyes and a new perspective on a problem. Now back to React.
Happy coding!
