Question

i am attempting to use elementtree in my node js server
however the following message is genearted on server startup

Cannot find module 'sax'

i had to install elementree from zip, what have i done wrong?

these are my rquire statements

var cache = require('./node_modules/node-cache');

var elementTree = require('./node_modules/node-elementtree');

this is my folder structure

module\node_modules\node-cache

module\node_modules\node-elementtree

my server js script resides in \module

Answer 1

The problem is because you are not using npm for installing your node-elementtree module

This is the package.json of node-elementtree. and it is clearly mentioned that there is a dependency on sax 0.3.5

"dependencies" : {
    "sax": "0.3.5"
  }

Incase if you had done npm install it would have resolved your dependency constraints.

Inside your node-elementtree module it uses sax here and your require didn’t resolve to a proper module. Hence the error. Incase you can’t use npm then install sax too using zip if possible but it may increase your dependency list once again as the above. So, Try resolving npm issue

Also you don’t need to use

var cache = require('./node_modules/node-cache');
var elementTree = require('./node_modules/node-elementtree');

in your code

var cache = require('node-cache');
var elementTree = require('node-elementtree');

the above would do. Node automatically locates the module from ./node_modules directory and even from many more places