‘create-react-app’ is not recognized as an internal or external command OR The term ‘create-react-app’ is not recognized

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If you’re using Windows to develop react apps, you might come across this error in Command Prompt (cmd.exe):

‘create-react-app’ is not recognized as an internal or external command

Or in PowerShell (powershell.exe):

create-react-app: The term ‘create-react-app’ is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program.
Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

This, of course, means create-react-app cannot be found. This can be caused by a few things:

• create-react-app is not installed
• The npm folder does not exist environmental PATH variable
• Something is wrong with npm

Let’s go in order to ensure everything is set up as expected.

Do npm and npx work?

In Command Prompt or PowerShell, type:

npm and press enter
npx and press enter

Do both commands work? If one or both commands do not work, I recommend installing nvm (Node version manager), which makes installing and switching between NodeJS versions easy. See this site for instructions.

Is create-react-app actually installed?

Make sure create-react-app is installed.

In Command Prompt or PowerShell, type:

npm install --global create-react-app

Once it’s installed, type create-react-app and press enter.

If it’s still broken, there’s probably only one reason it’s not working: missing folder in the PATH variable

Fix PATH environment variable

If everything is correct so far, then the problem is most likely a problem with the PATH variable. Not a hard fix, don’t worry.

The PATH variable is an environmental variable that contains a list of folders that Windows uses to access a file from any directory. So if the PATH variable contains C:\Windows\System32 and you’re in another directory such as C:\Users, typing calc.exe will launch Calculator as if you were in the C:\Windows\System32 directory (since calc.exe is actually located in C:\Windows\System32).

Applying this to NodeJS, the PATH variable must contain the folder where the NodeJS the .cmd files reside that call the scripts such as create-react-app:

Open PowerShell as Administrator (not Command Prompt) and type:

explorer (npm — global root)\.. and press enter

That should take you to a folder that contains:

• node.exe
• npm.cmd
• create-react-app.cmd

and a few other files.

If you don’t see these files, you need to reinstall NodeJS.

If you do see these files, good! Now we just need to add this folder to the PATH variable.

• Press Win+R and type sysdm.cpl and press enter
• Click the Advanced tab and click Environment Variables at the bottom
• In the bottom section where it says System variables, find the Path variable and double-click it
• Click New and then type the name of the folder that opened in the previous step
• Note that my path is C:\Program Files\nodejs but yours may be different (such as in AppData), that’s okay!

• Make sure to click Move Up until it’s at the very top of the list
• Click OK when done
• Restart your computer (required in order to reload the system environment variables)

That should take care of it! Have fun coding! 😊

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