npm install contextify fails on Windows

[codingoutloud]

I was trying to install topojson which has contextify as a dependency. I got an error that I was able to track down to be present when just installing contextify by itself (npm install contextify).

The error output is included further below, but from that error output, the salient detail seems to be "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V110\Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props" was not found. It appears that the "V110" directory is not installed on my machine (Windows 8.1, Visual Studio 2013, node v0.10.24),

I worked around the problem with the following:

Open a DOS box as Administrator.

From the error message, figure out the directory that subdirectory V110 was expected to be found and substitute that, if needed, for what I use in the following command. Note that, on my system, a newer V120 was present.

C:> cd C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0> mklink /d V110 V120

This creates a symbolic link such that the expected V110 path will be satisfied using the V120 directory which is there.

After this, npm install contextify and npm install topojson both worked fine.

The more detailed error messages follow.

D:\temp\temp\node_modules\contextify\build\contextify.vcxproj(18,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V110\Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
gyp ERR! build error
gyp ERR! stack Error: msbuild failed with exit code: 1
gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.onExit (D:\Program Files\nodejs\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\build.js:267:23)
gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
gyp ERR! stack at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:789:12)
gyp ERR! System Windows_NT 6.2.9200
gyp ERR! command "node" "D:\Program Files\nodejs\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\bin\node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
gyp ERR! cwd D:\temp\temp\node_modules\contextify
gyp ERR! node -v v0.10.24
gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v0.12.1
...
npm ERR! Failed at the contextify@0.1.6 install script.
npm ERR! This is most likely a problem with the contextify package,
npm ERR! not with npm itself.
npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system:
npm ERR! node-gyp rebuild

[a-carvallo]

I just had a similar issue, and in case it could help someone in the future here is what worked for me :

In my case it was VCTargetsPath which wasn't set in the registry for the appropriate tools version.

So I added the following :
Key : VCTargetsPath
Type : String/REG_SZ
Value : $([MSBuild]::ValueOrDefault('$(VCTargetsPath)','$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120'))

to these :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSBuild\ToolsVersions\14.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSBuild\ToolsVersions\14.0

(Got the value from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSBuild\ToolsVersions\12.0 which was fortunately set)