Maximum call stack size exceeded on npm install

Question

I'm trying to run npm install, this is output from console:

npm ERR! Linux 4.8.0-27-generic
npm ERR! argv "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install"
npm ERR! node v6.9.1
npm ERR! npm  v3.10.8

npm ERR! Maximum call stack size exceeded
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this error at:
npm ERR!     <https://github.com/npm/npm/issues>

and this is content of npm-debug.log:

113791 verbose stack RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
113791 verbose stack     at Object.color (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/npmlog/node_modules/console-control-strings/index.js:115:32)
113791 verbose stack     at EventEmitter.log._format (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/npmlog/log.js:252:51)
113791 verbose stack     at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/npmlog/log.js:138:24)
113791 verbose stack     at emitThree (events.js:116:13)
113791 verbose stack     at emit (events.js:194:7)
113791 verbose stack     at .<anonymous> (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/npmlog/node_modules/are-we-there-yet/tracker-group.js:23:18)
113791 verbose stack     at emitThree (events.js:116:13)
113791 verbose stack     at emit (events.js:194:7)
113791 verbose stack     at .<anonymous> (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/npmlog/node_modules/are-we-there-yet/tracker-group.js:23:18)
113791 verbose stack     at emitThree (events.js:116:13)
113791 verbose stack     at emit (events.js:194:7)
113792 verbose cwd /home/giorgi/AdMove/dev/web-advertiser-admove
113793 error Linux 4.8.0-27-generic
113794 error argv "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install"
113795 error node v6.9.1
113796 error npm  v3.10.8
113797 error Maximum call stack size exceeded
113798 error If you need help, you may report this error at:
113798 error     <https://github.com/npm/npm/issues>
113799 verbose exit [ 1, true ]

Removed node_modules several times and tried to reinstall. Can't understand what's the reason that causes this and how to fix it.

Answer 1

I'm not a Windows user, so if you are, try to check Rene Knop comment.

For Unix/OSX users, I've removed the root .npmrc file ~/.npmrc.
Before you're going to try it, please, check if there is nothing necessary over there you can use this command to bring all content into your terminal: cat ~/.npmrc .

If you have got something like:

cat: /Users/$USER/.npmrc: No such file or directory

to save a copy:

cp ~/.npmrc ~/.npmrc_copy

Now, try to remove it (Works for bash users: Unix / Ubuntu / OSX ...):

rm -f ~/.npmrc

This worked for me.
Hope this will be helpful for others.

Answer 2

Our company dev environment uses Artifactory as the default registry for our NPM dependencies, and when running npm install it was defaulting to this, which did not work... so manually specifying the main npm registry via npm install --registry https://registry.npmjs.org fixed this issue for me...

Answer 3

For those having this issue when building a Docker image with Jenkins (or any CI), make sure the package-lock.json is also copied to the container.

COPY ./src/package*.json /home/node/
RUN npm install

For us, the install actually went fine, the error only occurred when running npm prune production for the production image.

Answer 4

npm rebuild it has solved my problem

Answer 5

I had this problem and it was due to an upgrade of my git executable. I rolled back to Git-2.21.0.rc1.windows.1-64-bit and added this to my environment path and it fixed my issue.

Answer 6

I tried everything to fix this issue on my Mac. I think the issue started when I had already downloaded npm from Node.js and then reinstalled it with Homebrew while following along with a Team Treehouse video.

Here's what I tried:

From https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/removing-npm

sudo npm uninstall npm -g
sudo make uninstall
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/{lib/node{,/.npm,_modules},bin,share/man}/npm*

From How do I completely uninstall Node.js, and reinstall from beginning (Mac OS X)

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/{lib/node{,/.npm,_modules},bin,share/man}/{npm*,node*,man1/node*}

Here's what worked:

In the end, the only thing that worked for me was to clone down the npm-reinstall repo from GitHub that completely removed everything related to npm on my Mac.

https://github.com/brock/node-reinstall

I then had to reinstall node and npm from Node.js.