Issue with babel-jest dependency when running npm start in a React app

Question

All I am doing is running create-react-app and cd'ing into the app, then trying to run npm/yarn start. I get the following error/output/log. I have walked through all of the suggested steps. The only thing that works is the SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true in my .env as the last resort for both Yarn and npm. I have recently updated to Mojave and had to reinstall my Xcode if people have had a similar experience.

If the image isn't sufficient, I pasted the output below.

Thanks so much for your help in advance...Jason

Console Screenshot

Last login: Tue Oct 30 16:30:24 on ttys002
TheLAB11:~ jasonspiller$ cd repos/react-express-graphql-app/
TheLAB11:react-express-graphql-app jasonspiller$ npm start

> [email protected] start /Users/jasonspiller/repos/react-express-graphql-app
> react-scripts start


There might be a problem with the project dependency tree.
It is likely not a bug in Create React App, but something you need to fix locally.

The react-scripts package provided by Create React App requires a dependency:

  "babel-jest": "23.6.0"

Don't try to install it manually: your package manager does it automatically.
However, a different version of babel-jest was detected higher up in the tree:

  /Users/jasonspiller/node_modules/babel-jest (version: 23.4.2) 

Manually installing incompatible versions is known to cause hard-to-debug issues.

If prefer to ignore this check, add SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true to an .env file in your project.
That will permanently disable this message but you might encounter other issues.

To fix the dependency tree, try following the steps below in the exact order:

  1. Delete package-lock.json (not package.json!) and/or yarn.lock in your project folder.
  2. Delete node_modules in your project folder.
  3. Remove "babel-jest" from dependencies and/or devDependencies in the package.json file in your project folder.
  4. Run npm install or yarn, depending on the package manager you use.

In most cases, this should be enough to fix the problem.
If this has not helped, there are a few other things you can try:

  5. If you used npm, install yarn (http://yarnpkg.com/) and repeat the above steps with it instead.
     This may help because npm has known issues with package hoisting which may get resolved in future versions.

  6. Check if /Users/jasonspiller/node_modules/babel-jest is outside your project directory.
     For example, you might have accidentally installed something in your home folder.

  7. Try running npm ls babel-jest in your project folder.
     This will tell you which other package (apart from the expected react-scripts) installed babel-jest.

If nothing else helps, add SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true to an .env file in your project.
That would permanently disable this preflight check in case you want to proceed anyway.

P.S. We know this message is long but please read the steps above :-) We hope you find them helpful!

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! [email protected] start: `react-scripts start`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] start script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/jasonspiller/.npm/_logs/2018-10-30T23_09_42_358Z-debug.log

Answer 1

I just had the same problem. For some reason the package ended up in a node_modules directory in my home directory. It also gave me the exact same error for the jest package.

I'm not sure of the correct way to fix this as npm uninstall -g babel-jest and yarn global remove babel-jest do not do anything.

I fixed it by just blowing away the folders that cause the problem: bash rm -rf ~/node_modules/babel-jest ~/node_modules/jest

It would be great to know how those packages ended up there, and the proper way of getting rid of them, but for now just deleting the folders is enough to get CRA dev server running without skipping the preflight check.