Fixing “error: cannot find module semver” error in Node.js

When installing a package using npm, you might encounter the “error: cannot find module semver” error.

+ npm install
...
...
module.js:340
    throw err;
          ^
Error: Cannot find module 'semver'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:337:15)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:287:25)
    at Module.require (module.js:366:17)
    at require (module.js:385:17)

The error is caused because of a corrupted package-lock.json or yarn.lock. The most common reason for this is a change in the node version.

Fixing “error: cannot find module semver”

The fix is a pretty simple one. We need to nuke the node_modules folder and the lock file.

rm-rf node_modules package-lock.json yarn.lock

Then we need to clear our npm cache:

npm clean cache --force

And re-install the packages

npm i

This should fix the error most of the time and if it does not, you probably will need to uninstall and reinstall Node to fix it.

If you’re using homebrew:

brew uninstall --force node
brew install node

And that should hopefully fix it!