Software FAQ

Purpose

To answer common questions developers have about working on the repo.

Environment Setup FAQs

I’m getting package errors/outdated version errors/strange bugs. What should I do?

• A lot of issues can arise from having an outdated version of the develop branch. Try pulling and installing all dependencies again (git pull and then yarn install).

• Another solution is to run yarn install:hard which should give you a clean install.

Prisma keeps giving me strange bugs/I don't understand it, how do I learn more?

• Probably run yarn prisma:reset

• Check out the Software Prisma FAQ

• There is a lot of useful information in the prisma docs! Specifically, the environment files docs and the database URL formatting docs.

I'm getting strange compilation errors or TypeScript errors that seem like the project is broken or incomplete. What should I do?

• You may have the wrong prisma version installed or may not have run yarn install.

• If this does not work, please try yarn install:hard.

  • if this doesn’t work, you need to delete yarn.lock, and all four node_modules folders then run yarn install and yarn prisma:reset again

• If this also does not work, there is another method that resets ALL local progress. If you have not made many/any changes (and are fine with them being erased) or are setting up the project from scratch, try git reset --hard and then yarn install ---immutable to get the right version of prisma.

My CLI says that node/any needed package is not recognized! What should I do?

• Try restarting your CLI first (in VS Code this means hitting the little trash can icon to the right of "powershell" and then going to "Terminal" on the top of your screen and clicking "New Terminal"). If that doesn't work, try yarn install again and then restart your CLI. If psql is the problem and restarting or the other commands don't work, try using "pgAdmin" instead. Finally, the path variables for that package may not have been set up correctly. For this, google the package name followed by "path variable" to find a solution (each package is slightly different). If you’re on Windows and yarn is not recognized as an internal or external command and you have already tried restarting your terminal, type npm config get prefix and save the output. On the start search, type in ‘env’ and click on ‘Edit the system environment variables’. Click environment variables, edit the Path variable, and add the output you previously saved. Restart any open terminal and try using yarn again.

Node threw <insert any error here>! What should I do?

• Most Node errors are caused by the wrong version (although we did recently update the repo and new errors are bound to arise). Please confirm that you are on the correct version using node -v and if it does not show some variant of version 16 (happens sometimes even if you installed version 16 but have a previous pre-existing version), please reinstall version 16.

V3 FAQs

What is Yarn?

• Yarn is our new package manager and is replacing npm. This means you should never run npm install or any npm run ... command. Now it is always yarn install or yarn ... (no need for run keyword at all). Yarn is a lot faster (install times <5 seconds if you already have everything and are just updating) and also doesn’t change the package-lock.json every time which is nice.

General FAQs

What does XXX mean?

• Please navigate to the glossary page to find some of the common confusing terms that we use regularly! If there’s anything not on there, feel free to reach out to any of us about it (and let us know if you think it should be added)!