Difficulty in setting up the development environment

[vijay_joshi]

Good evening everyone,
I had recently started contributing to joplin and had my pr for minor typos and grammatical errors in the readme files merged yesterday. Now, I want to contribute to joplin in the form of code for which I started setting up my development environment. I've been facing some difficulties while getting started. Here is sequence of steps that I followed:

1. Forked the repo and cloned it
2. Changed directory to 'joplin/'
3. Successfully ran the command npm install -g windows-build-tools in the powershell
4. Then, in my vscode terminal I ran npm install
   After some time the following error occured:

lerna ERR! npm install exited 1 in '@joplin/app-desktop'
lerna WARN complete Waiting for 7 child processes to exit. CTRL-C to exit immediately.
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! root@ bootstrap: lerna bootstrap --no-ci
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the root@ bootstrap script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! C:\Users\vijay joshi\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache_logs\2021-03-16T14_29_44_252Z-debug.log
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! root@ postinstall: npm run bootstrap --no-ci && npm run build
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the root@ postinstall script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! C:\Users\vijay joshi\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache_logs\2021-03-16T14_29_47_186Z-debug.log

I tried searching for a fix on the internet and tried to remove package-lock.json file and then reinstall but it still didn't help.

Some details about my system that can be useful:
node --version v14.12.0
npm --version 6.14.8
OS: Windows 10

It would be of great help to me if any of the mentors @PackElend @roman_r_m or any other person active in this forum could help me with this.
Thanks in advance.

[CalebJohn]

It was found with a previous student that having a space character in the path causes issues with npm. In this case your username had a space in it. You'll need to move your Joplin project to a location without a space in the url.

Edit: Just a tip, a lot of software can't handle spaces properly, you should think about changing your username and avoiding spaces in file names/folder names.