Node and npm aren't available in Codex's shell path on Windows using a version manager
Open 💬 2 comments Opened Mar 9, 2026 by gradyat
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
26.306.11636
What subscription do you have?
Free
What platform is your computer?
Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64
What issue are you seeing?
A couple of environment quirks showed up: plain npm isn’t available in this shell path, and some parallel reads timed out, so I’m rerunning those pieces in a more direct way. [...] I can’t execute the package scripts in this shell because npm isn’t on the PATH here
node --versionalso failed becausenodeisn’t recognized, so Node isn’t on the PATH either.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Run a command in which Codex wants to use node or npm.
If it's relevant, I use fnm to install and manage my Node and npm versions.
What is the expected behavior?
Codex can find and run Node and npm on its shell
Additional information
I use fnm to install and manage my Node and npm versions. I am using a native Windows development environment, not WSL.
2 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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Same issue on macos (codex 26.506.31004 (2604)) with node installed via
nvm. Example chain of thought:It then finds a node binary at
~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/dependencies/node/bin/nodeand uses it to run project node_modules directly with some ugly command like:This works but adds repetitive extra steps and bypasses package.json test scripts.
I do have node/npm in my
$PATHbut it doesn't seem to inherit that even when running locally.This would be easy to fix in worktrees with the environments tab in settings but I can't find anything similar for local threads.