Common Issues

Installation/setup

'Can't find Python executable' error when installing Adapt

On Windows, when running $ npm install adapt-cli -g, you receive a long list of errors and the first few are something like:

gyp ERR! configure error
gyp ERR! stack Error: Can't find Python executable "python", you can set the PYTHON env variable.

You should just reboot your PC to allow the environment variables to be set correctly, the try the command again. You may still get an error like 'optional dep failed, continuing' - that's OK because it's only an option dependency.

'git is not installed' error when installing Adapt

On Windows, when running $ npm install adapt-cli -g, you receive an error like:

Oh dear, something went wrong. I'm terribly sorry. git is not installed or is not in the path

To fix this, check that GIT is installed correctly and add GIT to your system path, as documented at http://blog.countableset.ch/2012/06/07/adding-git-to-windows-7-path/

'fatal: unable to connect to github.com'

The likely problem here is that cloning from GitHub using the git:// protocol has been blocked by a firewall. Check this helpful answer on StackOverflow for a troubleshooting guide.

Course creation

'Can't stat' error when creating a course

On Windows, when running $ adapt create course you receive an error similar to:

Oh dear, something went wrong. I'm terribly sorry.
Can't stat "Users\\your.username\\.adapt\\tmp\\50233e50-b8e7-11e3-b613-9343b13d4c4c\\adapt_framework-master\\.bowerrc": Error: ENOENT, stat 'C:\Users\your.username\Documents\Adapt\Users\your.username\.adapt\tmp\50233e50-b8e7-11e3-b613-9343b13d4c4c\adapt_framework-master\.bowerrc'

To fix this, you'll need to configure your $HOME environment variable.

On Win 7 go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System then select Advanced system settings > Environment variables

Then add a new variable called HOME with the value 'C:\Users\your.username' (or whatever the correct path to your user profile directory happens to be)

Running your course

In IE8 you receive the warning "A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly"

(N.B. see https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/175500 for more information about this warning)

When targetting IE8 it is recommended that a single page be limited to a maximum of 20 components. Check the size of each page and try breaking up large pages to see if this resolves the problem. If the problem appears to relate to a page with an assessment, check how many questions are in the assessment. Try reducing the number of questions or splitting the assessment into multiple smaller assessments. See https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt-contrib-assessment for more information.

Server does not support JSON mime-type

Some web servers - typically Microsoft IIS (or SharePoint which runs on IIS) - do not have support for the JSON mime-type, leading to the course being unable to load these files from the server and therefore not launch properly. Whilst it is possible to configure the server to have support for the JSON mime-type, in practice this is sometimes not possible - in which case the best option is to switch your JSON files over to use the .txt file extension instead of .json - in order to do this you will need to manually change the extension of all your JSON files then use the --jsonext switch in combination with the various Grunt commands to tell the tasks that you're using a different extension. Note that this functionality is only available from Adapt v3 onwards.