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reactjsnpmarchlinuxmanjaro

npm start not detecting chrome and returning ENOENT error (ARCH Linux)

I am using Manjaro and have downloaded google-chrome-stable from the AUR package. Even though google chrome is set as a default browser, npm start still defaults to opening firefox, after I deleted firefox I start receiving the following error

Starting the development server...

node:events:342
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: spawn /usr/bin/firefox ENOENT
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:282:19)
    at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:480:16)
    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21)
Emitted 'error' event on ChildProcess instance at:
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:288:12)
    at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:480:16)
    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21) {
  errno: -2,
  code: 'ENOENT',
  syscall: 'spawn /usr/bin/firefox',
  path: '/usr/bin/firefox',
  spawnargs: [ 'http://localhost:3000' ]
}
Solution

  • React uses the BROWSER environment variable to decide what browser to use. Try running your React app as follows:

    BROWSER=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable npm start

    If this works fine, you can set Chrome to be the default in these cases by adding

    export BROWSER=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable

    to your terminal profile (~/.zshrc, if you're using zsh).