Today npm stopped working

I went to start a new project and did my usual housekeeping

npm init -y
git init
npm i aws-sdk

And today npm decided to hang on the install.

Cancel, rm modules folder, reinstall.... hang

It didn't seem to matter what I was installing.... npm was stuck.  It gave me error logs, which weren't helpful.  And then I started to get npm maximum call stack size exceeded errors.  Ugh..... so much for getting anything done today.

I tried the usual remedies.

rm -rf ./node_modules
npm cache clean --force
npm rebuild

I tried on a fresh directory.  Nothing made a difference.

Then I tried npm i -g npm just for kicks and giggles.

Weirdly, after I ran that command, I could get one subsequent npm command to work.  Then the following commands would hang.

I ran npm config edit which loaded the .npmrc file.  I didn't edit anything, but after that npm started to work again.  Just for good measure, I added a local .npmrc in my directory.

The moral of the story is sometimes things just stop working.

Happy coding.