Error: Cannot find module 'aws-cdk/lib/api/aws-auth' when using CDK installed with homebrew

[AllanOricil]

It does not work with cdk installed via homebrew

The required libraries should be fetched after determining the CDK installation, as people could have not installed it with npm.

You could also try to publish this cli to the homebrew registry. This way you can require homebrew's global node modules, I think

[lakkeger]

Hi @AllanOricil!
Please set your NODE_PATH to the node_module folder of your Brew installed AWS CDK and it will work.
In my case this would be something like this:
export NODE_PATH=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/aws-cdk/2.147.1/libexec/lib/node_modules
For further information please have a look at NodeJS documentation on module loading: https://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#loading-from-node_modules-folders
Hope this helps. If you have any further questions please let us know.

[AllanOricil]

@lakkeger if I do it, NVM will probably break. I use multiple node versions, in multiple projects, so I can't break NVM

[lakkeger]

The issue you experience in general not a bug in aws-cdk-local but a module look up issue with NodeJS. Our assumption by default is that node knows well where to look up the necessary packages, in this case aws-cdk. Since you've installed it with brew this is not the case.
So as a solution I see 3 options:

1. We could pin to certain aws-cdk version as a hard dependency to the project but that would result in inflexibility so you'd need to rely to a certain version always to use a new feature in CDK and your brew install would be ignored.
2. Alternative option would be to process your environment and look up your CDK installation, but that comes with many assumptions and locations where the lib could be found. ie brew installed lib not living under the same folder structure as the node one
3. We can rely on NodeJS provided option, the NODE_PATH. According to the docs by defining NODE_PATH you expand the lookup path not overriding it:

If the NODE_PATH environment variable is set to a colon-delimited list of absolute paths, then Node.js will search those paths for modules if they are not found elsewhere.

ref: https://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#loading-from-the-global-folders
As you can tell from the above quote NODE_PATH is the last place nodejs will look your module.

So in context of the above I see no value in it to implement something that we can work around with a small config change.

If you are still worried, I'd recommend to use something like direnv/nix/devcontainers to separate project environments completely not just on the node level so your NODE_PATH can be unloaded/loaded by every project. (Perhaps the easiest to implement it without big changes is direnv.)

[AllanOricil]

@lakkeger why not print a message on the terminal to guide users to update NODE_PATH? The main issue is that I got lost and had no directions, and had to wait weeks for you to help me

"we identified cdk packages are not installed in the same directory as localstack. Please, update NODE_PATH with the path where cdk modules are installed running the following command ..."

[lakkeger]

I understand your frustration and our team is working on it tirelessly to improve the product and the UX/DX of the surrounding ecosystem. Unfortunately there was only best effort support and development on this repo for a long time.
As a reasonable middle ground I can offer the following:

• we can throw a better exception if the aws-cdk module is missing, perhaps do an additional OS check so we can ask if you've added your CDK installation to the NODE_PATH
• additionally I can add this particular scenario as a MacOS specific section to the README so there is some guidance about this tooling combination

[rdingwell]

Just to add onto this error, it's not just related to a homebrew install. I have the same issue having installed cdk-local with npm.
npm install -g aws-cdk-local aws-cdk

[lakkeger]

Hi @rdingwell,
Please provide some information on the packages, steps and the system you're running into this issue as I was unable to reproduce it with latest versions.

[rdingwell]

@lakkeger I found my issue when looking through my .npm directory. You can install cdk in a couple of ways using npm, either with npm install -g aws-cdk or npm install -g cdk . Using cdk, it installs the aws-cdk library under it's own node_modules directory which makes it unaccessible to other libraries. Once I removed the cdk node module and installed via aws-cdk everything worked fine.