visual studio code nodejs request 'launch': cannot launch target (reason: spawn node ENOENT)

Question

When I use visual studio code to debug a nodejs app. visual studio code tell me request \'launch\': cannot launch target (reason: spawn node ENOENT)

Answer 1

Some discussions are posted in this here

How do I debug "Error: spawn ENOENT" on node.js?

Especially, the following points should be checked

• Ensure the environment variable PATH is set
• PATHEXT environment variable that can cause certain calls to spawn to not work on Windows.

Answer 2

Managed to get past this when running on Windows by specifying npm.cmd instead of npm in the VS code debug configuration like so

"runtimeExecutable": "npm.cmd",

Answer 3

I was getting this error on a Debian Linux system. I noticed the same thing worked OK on Windows.

Next I noticed that the Node.JS executable is called node on Windows but on Debian (and on Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu) it's called nodejs. So I created an alias - from a root terminal, I ran

ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/node

and this solved the problem.

Answer 4

This usually happens if you already had your Visual Code Editor running while installing node js on Windows OS. I would advise you to shut down your Visual Studio Code and restart it. This problem should go away.

If not do a machine reboot and verify if the debug works flawlessly