electron-packager spawn ENOENT

Question

I'm working on an electron app that controls gulp tasks via gui. You click on a task and it runs. Pretty simple stuff. On macOS, when I run npm start it runs just fine, but when I package it with electron-packager, I get this error:

Uncaught Exception:
Error: spawn gulp ENOENT
    at exports._errnoException (util.js:1022:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:193:32)
    at onErrorNT (internal/child_process.js:359:16)
    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:74:11)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:98:9)

This is the code:

exports.runTask = (taskName, projPath) => {
    const cp = spawn('gulp', [ taskName ], {cwd: projPath});
    cp.stdout.setEncoding('utf8');
    cp.stdout.on('data', data => {
        console.log(data);
        mainWindow.webContents.send('task-console-data', data);
    });

    cp.stderr.setEncoding('utf8');
    cp.stderr.on('data', data => {
        console.error(data);
        displayNotification({text: `[error] ${data}`});
        mainWindow.webContents.send('task-console-data', `[error] ${data}`);
    });

    cp.on('exit', code => {
        if (code === 0) {
          displayNotification({
            title: 'gulp',
            subtitle: 'Finished running tasks'
          });
        } else if ( !code || code === null ) {
            return;
        } else {
            console.error(`Exited with error code ${code}`);

            displayNotification({
                title: 'gulp',
                subtitle: `Exited with error code ${code}`,
                sound: 'Basso'
            });
        }
    });
};

Answer 1

In case anyone else is running into this problem, the answer is to correct the $PATH. There is a package on npm that does this for you.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/fix-path

Answer 2

You should forward the process.env.PATH to the spawn options because the child process environment variables is overriding in options.env. So the OS don't know exactly where to look your command gulp.

So you can do this:

const cp = spawn('gulp', [ taskName ], {
    cwd: projPath,
    env: {
        PATH: process.env.PATH,
    },
});