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Skill auto-install fails: npx 404, @nodespaceai/skill not found on npm registry #2271
Description
Problem
The app's skill auto-install step fails, reported two ways from the same underlying failure:
- "Skill adding failed due to npx error."
- Skill auto-install fails with a 404:
@nodespaceai/skillnot found on the npm registry.
Likely cause
The skill install path shells out via npx to fetch @nodespaceai/skill (or similar), and that package either isn't published to npm, isn't public, or the name/scope is wrong. Worth checking packages/desktop-app/src-tauri/src/skill_setup.rs and packages/skill's own package.json/publish config against what's actually live on the npm registry.
Severity
Non-blocking relative to the daemon-startup bug (that one prevents the app from doing anything at all), but still a real broken feature on a fresh install — the skill is meant to install automatically and currently doesn't.
Reproduction
Fresh install via brew install --cask nodespaceai/nodespace/nodespace, launch, observe skill auto-install failing.
Found via local free-tier testing on a fresh brew install (2026-08-24).
Activity
malibio commentedon Aug 24, 2026
Root cause identified: this is the unfinished tail of #1184, not a new regression.
#1184 ("Publish
@nodespaceai/skillto npm") was closed as completed on 2026-05-19, but the package was never actually published. Verified today:The package itself is fine and fully prepared locally —
packages/skill/package.jsondeclares the correct name@nodespaceai/skillat v0.2.0, withbin.nodespace-skilland afilesallowlist coveringdist,shims, andSKILL.md. Nothing is wrong with the code; the publish step simply never ran, so the auto-install path shells out via npx to a package that has never existed on the registry.That also explains why the two reported symptoms ("npx error" and "404 not found") are the same failure — npx reports a registry 404 as a generic spawn error.
Fix
Publish the package (and confirm the scope is public — a scoped package defaults to restricted, which would 404 identically for unauthenticated users):
Worth adding the publish to the release pipeline so the npm package and the app that depends on it cannot drift apart again — the current failure is exactly that drift.
mstomar125 commentedon Aug 25, 2026
Already fixed — no work needed. The npx-based installer this issue describes was replaced with a direct
bun-invoked, bundled-resource installer in commitb6ec420c(#2143), which landed 2026-08-18 — almost two months after the v0.2.0 build (2026-06-25) the original report was tested against.skill_setup.rsnow explicitly never falls back to npx/npm (pinned byinstaller_command_invokes_bun_directly_not_npx_or_npm, plus a real end-to-endrun_skill_installer_actually_installs_into_an_isolated_hometest — both pass on current main). This is now included in the just-shipped v0.2.1, so the skill auto-install should work correctly on a fresh install going forward.mstomar125 commentedon Aug 25, 2026
Correction to my closure above: this only addressed the app's OWN internal installer no longer needing npx — that part is genuinely fixed and stays fixed. It did not address the root cause Michael's comment right above it identified:
@nodespaceai/skillhas still never been published to the npm registry (confirmed 404 at the time, and this hasn't changed since). I closed on the wrong half of the problem.The actual fix for that is now comprehensively tracked in #2283 (public import repo + automated publish pipeline, filed the night before this closure — I missed it), which explicitly lists this issue as something it expects to close. Leaving this closed since #2283 is the fuller, correct tracking issue rather than reopening a duplicate — flagging here so the history is accurate for anyone reading it later.