NPM commands not working when called from inside Node

[wbt]

This issue was discovered here.

When I run node -v on the command line, I get 7.24.0.
When I run npm show --json eslint-config-xo@latest peerDependencies directly on the command line, I get the expected:

{
"eslint": ">=7.20.0"
}

Instead, suppose I make the following Javascript file as spawntest.js:

//One of the two next lines should be uncommented; doesn't really matter which.
//const spawnSync = require("cross-spawn").sync;
const spawnSync = require("child_process").spawnSync;
const npmProcess = spawnSync(
    "npm",
    //['-v'], //Using this instead of the next line gives the same result. 
    ["show", "--json", "eslint-config-xo@latest", "peerDependencies"],
    { encoding: "utf8" }
);
const error = npmProcess.error;
if (error && error.code === "ENOENT") {
    return null;
}
const fetchedText = npmProcess.stdout.trim();
console.log('fetchedText is "' + fetchedText + '"');

The result is:

fetchedText is "Sorry, there's a problem with nodist. Couldn't resolve npm version spec 7.24.0 : Couldn't find any matching version"

The init procedure in eslint tries to parse that as JSON, and understandably fails.

This seems like it might be an issue in nodist, so I'm filing a report here.

[wbt]

The error is getting thrown from this line and bubbling up through this function.

Apparently it's looking for 7.24.0 in the list of npm versions which are the names of children directories under os.Getenv("NODIST_PREFIX")+"/npmv" and on my machine, 7.24.0 isn't one of them. However, when I try to run 'nodist npm local 7.24.0' per the documentation, I get the following error:

{"message":"Bad credentials","documentation_url":"https://docs.github.com/rest"}.
Sorry.

So I now suspect something related to how Nodist gets npm distributions.

[aladdin-add]

maybe it's a known issue, as seen in the Known issues:

native modules: Since the node version changes at the mercy of the shim executable, based on env vars, target directory and the global setting, and availability of node versions, it is possible that locally or globally installed node modules that depend on a specific version of node (usually native modules and downloaders) stop working. npm rebuild makes things work again in these cases.

[wbt]

As it turns out, this is a duplicate of #233 and #235, but it sure didn't look like that at the start.