node.js - npm WARN install Refusing to install hapi as a dependency of itself

Question

I tried to do the following (per instructions from official site):

• mkdir hapi && cd hapi
• npm init
• npm install hapi --save

But this gives me an error like this:

npm WARN install Refusing to install hapi as a dependency of itself

Now, I made a new test folder called hapiTest and repeated the commands and then everything worked fine.

I tried the same process with a folder gulp and npm install gulp --save, and got the same error, so my conclusion is that I can't have the name of the folder be the same as the package that I want to install, but can someone back this statement up with some official documentation?

Answer 1

When you did the command npm init, there were probably some relevant questions you needed to answer. Specifically, the name of your module. When you use npm init, it assumes you want the name of the module you're creating to be called the name of the folder it is in.

So it's not the name of the folder that is stopping you from installing the dependency, it is the name of the npm module that you are creating.

Open the resulting package.json within your hapi directory, and rename the module to something other than hapi. Here's an example 'package.json' that works, even when residing in a folder called hapi:

{
  "name": "hapi-test",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "hapi": "^7.5.2"
  }
}

Added Note

I've not been able to find any documentation thus-far explaining this phenomena in the context of npm; though it is a bit of a no-brainer. Requiring modules with the same name within the same application would conflict with the CommonJS philosophy.