Error saying Failed to find required executable npm in paths

Question

My ansible version:

ansible 2.5.0

When I run the playbook against "local" this works just fine, but if run from as remote using ssh, it fails and gives the following error:

Failed to find required executable npm in paths

Playbook:

- name: installing node
  homebrew:
    name: node
    state: present
    update_homebrew: yes

- name: Install appium from npm (always up to date)
  npm:
    name: appium
    state: latest
    global: yes

Answer 1

Hey @Thomas, 

Seems like those extra paths have been configured in config files which are only readable by the interactive shell.

There's "path_helper" in Mac OS which is called on /etc/profile and seems to read /etc/paths and/or /etc/paths.d to set PATH properly but when running from an interactive non-login (or non interactive) shell /etc/profile is not sourced and that's why the PATH is different and hence the error.