Updating from NativeScript 1.4 to NativeScript 1.5

Posted By : Dan Wilson November 24, 2015 2:05 PM

I ran into an issue updating NativeScript 1.4 to NativeScript 1.5. The symptom:

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1> nativescript@1.5.0 postinstall C:\Users\DanWilson\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\nativescript
2> node postinstall.js

Basically, after uninstalling and reinstalling NativeScript on Windows 7 (maybe other OS's are affected also), the process would hang at the node postinstall.js. By hang, I mean it was stuck at the above status for 15 minutes. I looked at the source for postinstall.js and nothing specifically stood out to me as potentially the problem. Hat tip to Jen Looper for the suggestion to upgrade Node.js. Upgrading to the latest 4.x fixed the issue for me.

Why were you running an out of date Node.js DAN?

The NativeScript Getting Started Documentation stipulated Node .12 at the time. Since NativeScript has been released, they have updated the documentation to now include Node 4.x.

It is possible a fresh install might work on .12 or an older version of Node, however once I updated to the latest Node Binaries, the install for NativeScript 1.5 finished promptly. If you have issues upgrading to NativeScript 1.5, freshen up your Node.js version and that should take care of it.

Application Upgrade

Another thing I noticed, was a difference in the values in the root package.json for the value "tns-core-modules" was 1.4.0. I manually changed that value to 1.5.0 and the application built and deployed successfully. I'm not sure if you HAVE to do that, but I did it and saw no ill effect.

Before manually changing tns-core-modules

Before I manually changed the value of tns-core-modules, I ran npm install to ensure my dependencies were set correctly. Here is what happened:

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1C:\_web\NativeScript\TradeOMatic>npm install
2npm WARN package.json @ No description
3npm WARN package.json @ No repository field.
4npm WARN package.json @ No README data
5npm WARN package.json @ No license field.