node-gyp fails when on drive/folder with space in name

[davidrinnan]

this was originally a bug that I posted at node-canvas
Automattic/node-canvas#407

I have two harddrives which means that osx gave them the names HD 1 and HD 2.

When I npm install canvas I get:

clang: error: no such file or directory: 'HD'
clang: error: no such file or directory: '2/davidrinnan/.node-gyp/0.10.26/src'
clang: error: no such file or directory: 'HD'
clang: error: no such file or directory: '2/davidrinnan/.node-gyp/0.10.26/deps/uv/include'
clang: error: no such file or directory: 'HD'
clang: error: no such file or directory: '2/davidrinnan/.node-gyp/0.10.26/deps/v8/include'

The drive used is called 'Macintosh HD 2' and we can see how it breaks down the harddrive name into individual paths rather than putting the name between ' '

The strange thing is that I have many modules installed but node canvas is the first that has caused issues. It apparently tries to do a node-gyp rebuild. I guess very few others do.

So I made sure that node-gyp was updated to the latest version. But same issue anyways...

I then found out that npm uses its own node-gyp, regardless of the version that I have installed but I found the command to update npms internal node-gyp as well. Still same issue.

And as one can see in the error message I am running 0.10.26 of node. First I was running 10.20 but I had the same error message there as well...

[a0viedo]

hey @davidrinnan, it's been some time now. is this still an issue?

[working-name]

Still an issue on macOS when .node-gyp is in a location with spaces in the path. Moving the .node-gyp to another location without spaces and exporting the new path will help you get over this kind of trouble.

#copy your current .node-gyp to another path
cp -R ~/.node-gyp /Path/Without/Spaces
#export the new ENV var, or add it to your .bashrc or whatever
export npm_config_devdir=/Path/Without/Spaces/.node-gyp
#retry the install, it should now compile ok.
npm i <trouble module>

[bnoordhuis]

Right, this is still an issue but it's unlikely to get fixed because it's not just node-gyp that's sensitive to blanks in paths.

I'll go ahead and close this out as a wontfix. The workaround is to use a path without blanks, like @working-name describes.