NodeJS installed modules are not recognized on Windows 10 - node.js

Question

I need some help to setup NodeJS on a Windows 10 machine.
I installed the 10.15.3 LTS version from the official website which has done the following:
Node installed at C:\Program Files\nodejs\
Added to the Path in the user's variables: C:\Users\rsantos\AppData\Roaming\npm
Added to the Path in the environment variables: C:\Program Files\nodejs\
Created an empty npm folder at: C:\Users\rsantos\AppData\Roaming
Then with npm init I initialized the package file which was created at C:\Users\rsantos.
Followed by npm install supervisor which:
Created a npm-cache folder at C:\Users\rsantos\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache
Created a node_modules folder (with the supervisor) at C:\Users\rsantos\node_modules
Created a package-lock.json file at C:\Users\rsantos with:
{
"name": "rsantos",
"version": "1.0.0",
"lockfileVersion": 1,
"requires": true,
"dependencies": {
"supervisor": {
"version": "0.12.0",
"resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/supervisor/-/supervisor-0.12.0.tgz",
"integrity": "sha1-3n5jNwFbKRhRwQ81OMSn8EkX7ME="
}
}
}
Updated the package.json file to:
{
"name": "rsantos",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": "index.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
"author": "",
"license": "ISC",
"dependencies": {
"supervisor": "^0.12.0"
}
}
Then when I open the command line and type:
C:\Users\rsantos\Desktop>supervisor --watch C:\NodeJS_Projects\Proj1\ -e js C:\NodeJS_Projects\Proj1\Test.js
I get:
'supervisor' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
After that I tried to install supervisor globally and it started to work.
The next error was 'require' not being recognized after installed locally.
I followed the same approach which made supervisor work and installed require globally. My code is requiring the module with require('request'). But even installed globally, it fails with this error:
Error: Cannot find module 'request' at Function.Module._resolveFilename (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:582:15)
Notes:
I uninstalled everything and reinstalled, the result was always the same.
Also played with the environment variables but still no good.
npm list -g request outputs this: C:\Users\rsantos\AppData\Roaming\npm -- request#2.88.0
At this point my C:\Users\rsantos\node_modules folder has all the modules, including supervisor and request.
The package.json has supervisor and request as dependencies.
The package-lock.json seems to have all the modules in the node_modules folder, including supervisor and request.
I still get the Cannot find module 'request' error.
Can someone help please?

Answer 1

when you want to use a NPM package as tool (e.g. >supervisor --watch PATH), you can install the package --global. When you want to load the package in Node with require() I would install it locally.
Does the following work for you?
Install the tooling globally:
npm install --global supervisor
Set up your project in local folder:
mkdir project
cd project
npm init -y
npm install --save request # install to project/node_modules
node index.js # start your app