Troubleshooting

This site contains some tips to troubleshoot your app in case something doesn’t work as expected.

Install or re-install dependencies#

When run for the first time, you might see Deno complaining about missing packages. Install them with:

deno install --allow-scripts

If you run into dependency trouble later and suspect that Deno might be caching an outdated package, you can force a clean reinstall by adding -r to the above command.

Update Fresh#

The easiest way to resolve most issues is to ensure that you’re on the latest version of Fresh. We continuously work on Fresh and there is a good chance that the issue you’re running into has already been resolved in the latest version of Fresh.

Don’t use esm.sh#

Fresh 1.x heavily relied on esm.sh to be able to use npm packages with Fresh. This continued a bit through the early alpha versions of Fresh 2. With the move to vite this is not necessary anymore and you should use the relevant npm package directly from npm.

deno.json

  {
    "imports": {
-     "cowsay": "https://esm.sh/cowsay"
+     "cowsay": "npm:cowsay@^1.6.0"
    }
  }

Info

Not using esm.sh solves many issues and footguns with duplicate Preact versions in your app. If you’re seeing strange JavaScript errors in the browser in your app than this is likely the cause.

Attach a debugger#

To attach a debugger to vite with Deno run this command:

Terminal

deno run -A --inspect npm:vite
# or
deno run -A --inspect-brk npm:vite

Debug vite resolution#

To debug vite resolution issues run vite with the --debug flag. This will print lots of debugging information to the terminal.

Debug vite transformations#

To debug vite plugin transformations, use vite-plugin-inspect. This gives you a UI that shows all transformations of all plugins for every file.

My deployment won’t start#

If your deployment doesn’t boot, check the following things:

1. Make sure that you ran deno task build.
2. Make sure that your entry points to the generated _fresh/server.js file instead of main.ts. The latter won’t work with Fresh 2.

Error messages like ISOLATE_INTERNAL_FAILURE may indicate above issues, but can also be caused by other problems in your deployment configuration.

VS Code does not find packages and/or types#

If you see errors in VS Code like Cannot find module 'fresh/runtime' or see a lot of TypeScript errors, you likely have not installed the Deno extension. You can easily find it inside VS Code’s extension browser (identifier: denoland.vscode-deno) or get it from the marketplace.

Once installed and enabled, the currently installed Deno version should appear in the bottom status bar. If this does not happen automatically, you can enable the Deno extension via the command palette (Cmd+Shift+P on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux) and run Deno: Enable.

For detailed instructions, see the official Deno VS Code documentation.