Robb. Knight.

Sometimes I hate computers. This evening I lost two hours to a stupid issue that had me doing all sorts of command line nonsense trying to fix it.

I tried to install xml2json with npm and was presented with a wall of errors culminating in the actual error of No module named 'distutils'. It's related to node-gyp and anyone who's been using MacOS and node long enough knows this is always a pain in the arse.

After a lot of googling and reinstalling Xcode command line tools, it turns out when I'd upgraded some brew packages earlier in the evening this had upgraded my python install from 3.11 to 3.12; the latter of which removes the aforementioned distutils. So I uninstalled python and did brew install [email protected] and it was fixed.

Fucking computers.

Update 2024-03-02: As David pointed out on Mastodon this is a possibly temporary solution that might cause issues in the future. The real solution (although I don't remember if I tried this or not) is to do pip install setuptools as per this GitHub issue.