'Command Not Found' issues with Globally Installed Node.js Packages

Nowadays, I’ve been playing around with Netlify, mainly because their generous free plan is perfect for personal sites. Beyond just hosting your site, their serverless functions are a fantastic way to quickly build APIs or simple HTTP endpoints for tasks like webhooks.

All right, enough free marketing for Netlify—this isn’t a sponsored post 😁. One feature that caught my attention was the ability to develop, run, and test these functions locally using their CLI. Installation seemed straightforward: just install the package globally, and you’re good to go.

npm install -g netlify-cli

But of course, that wasn’t the case for me—because why would things go smoothly? I kept running into a Command Not Found error every time I tried running netlifycommand. After some digging (and learning from others’ experiences), I discovered the issue: it was my Git Bash setup. When I checked my npm global prefix with:

npm get prefix -g

I found it was set to C:\Program Files\Git\usr\local

The fix was simple: Just add this to my system’s PATH env. variable and boom! I can build and test Netlify functions locally!

I’ll keep sharing notes from my trial-and-error adventures for future me -and hopefully, for anyone else who might find them useful!