Troubleshooting

Document any obscure fixes here.

Problem: When running WSL 2, I see “Error: 0x80370102 The virtual machine could not be started because a required feature is not installed”.

Solution: In most cases, you need to look up how to access your machine’s BIOS settings and enable virtualisation. I already had that enabled, but running bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto fixed the issue.

Problem: When running the client host in WSL, I can’t access localhost:3000 from my browser in Windows.

Solution: Run wsl --shutdown from PowerShell or Command Prompt, then open WSL and run your commands again.

Problem: When running the timetable scraper locally, I see “Error: Failed to launch chrome! … error while loading shared libraries: libXcursor.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” (or similar).

Solution: If you’re on Ubuntu or another Linux distro with apt, run sudo apt install -yq gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget.

Problem: When running the timetable scraper locally, I see “(chrome:10817): Gtk-WARNING **: 19:44:39.628: cannot open display” (or similar).

Solution: Instead of npm start, use npm run start:production. This will launch the headless (hidden) Chromium instances, which don’t need to be displayed.

Problem: When running the timetable scraper locally, I see “Warning: Accessing non-existent property 'count' of module exports inside circular dependency”.

Solution: If this is actually preventing the scraper from working, run npm install mongodb@latest.

Problem: You try to run through windows and get 'REACT_APP_ENVIRONMENT' is not recognized as an internal or external command.

Solution: Install and follow the instructions here → npm: win-node-env for how to add custom variables.