Installing Plugin Errors on Windows

[joepavitt]

A colleague recently has tried to npm install our Website since we added the Algolia plugin for Netlify, and hit the following error (reported here on our own repo):

Installing plugins

@algolia/[email protected]
​
Dependencies installation error
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
​
Error message
Error while installing dependencies in C:\Users\iansk\Documents\GitHub\website/.netlify/plugins/
npm ERR! code 1
npm ERR! path C:\Users\iansk\Documents\GitHub\website.netlify\plugins\node_modules@algolia\netlify-plugin-crawler
npm ERR! command failed
npm ERR! command C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /d /s /c [ -d dist/ ] || npm run build
npm ERR! > @algolia/[email protected] build
npm ERR! > npx tsc -b
npm ERR!
npm ERR!
npm ERR!
npm ERR! This is not the tsc command you are looking for
npm ERR!
npm ERR!
npm ERR! To get access to the TypeScript compiler, tsc, from the command line either:
npm ERR!
npm ERR! - Use npm install typescript to first add TypeScript to your project before using npx
npm ERR! - Use yarn to avoid accidentally running code from un-installed packages
npm ERR! '[' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
npm ERR! operable program or batch file.
​
npm ERR! C:\Users\iansk\AppData\Local\npm-cache_logs\2023-04-19T19_41_46_403Z-debug-0.log

All Mac users are able to run the npx netlify dev command without issues, but I've since been able to reproduce this problem on a fresh install and run on my own Windows machine too.

I managed to reproduce, and consequently bypass the above error with an:

npm install -g typescript

but then immediately hit the following problem:

> Installing plugins
   - @algolia/[email protected]
​
  Dependencies installation error
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
​
  Error message
  Error while installing dependencies in C:\Users\Joe_P\Documents\FlowForge\website/.netlify/plugins/
  npm ERR! code 1
  npm ERR! path C:\Users\Joe_P\Documents\FlowForge\website\.netlify\plugins\node_modules\@algolia\netlify-plugin-crawler
  npm ERR! command failed
  npm ERR! command C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /d /s /c [ -d dist/ ] || npm run build
  npm ERR! > @algolia/[email protected] build
  npm ERR! > npx tsc -b
  npm ERR!
  npm ERR! error TS5083: Cannot read file 'C:/Users/Joe_P/Documents/FlowForge/website/.netlify/plugins/node_modules/@algolia/netlify-plugin-crawler/tsconfig.json'.
  npm ERR! '[' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
  npm ERR! operable program or batch file.
​
  npm ERR!     C:\Users\Joe_P\AppData\Local\npm-cache\_logs\2023-04-19T21_59_19_675Z-debug-0.log

I'm stuck here and unable to progress further. Seems as though this plugin is not Windows-friendly? Any guidance would be appreciated.