npm install gets stuck at fetchMetadata

Question

I\'m currently unable to run npm install in any project since today. I\'m running node v8.2.1 & npm 5.3.0 (installed via nvm).

When typing npm

Answer 1

As a first thing, run npm install --verbose to see more!

What happened in my case:

In your package.json search for packages you directly get from Github. In my case such a package did not exist anymore. Such lines look like

"NAME_OF_PACKAGE": "git+ssh://git@github.com/SOME_USER/NAME_OF_PACKAGE.git",

Remove the package, fix the name/location or change to the npm version of the package.

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Further note: I got several other similar errors, all the same but the package name was different from longest@^1.0.1. I also had p-try@something or array-ify@something

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For me all that didn't work: rm -rf ~/.npm, npm cache clean or rm package-lock.json all didn't work!