The "gulp" command is not found or does not work on node_modules (npm)

01-zsh-command-not-found-gulp.md

I recently wanted to install a new NPM module (that is Gulp). I followed the getting started guide and ran the needed command but it didn’t worked and I felt desperate… but I finally found the solution!

02-solution.md

To give you a little context: I ran the following command for installing Gulp (a node package module) globally:

npm install -g gulp

The installation succeed but when I ran this gulp command in the command line I got a "gulp: command not found" error. It appeared that it installed “Gulp” in my local folder that is /Users/YOURUSERNAME/node_modules and not in the global NPM folder.

You can check this by running this command: npm root or npm root -g, which was returning my personal directory /Users/YOURUSERNAME/node_modules and not the expected /usr/local/lib/node_modules.

After some trial & error, I finally found the solution. You have to change the “npm config prefix” like so:

npm config set prefix /usr/local

Then when I re-ran npm root -g, I got the correct root folder: /usr/local/lib/node_modules

When I reinstalled Gulp globally (with the -g param) it finally worked and appeared that it was now correctly installed in the global NPM folder. Yeay!