Digitalocean Apps error deploying NPM when caret (^) before version number.

Posted on April 18, 2021

I had the following code in my package.json file.

"engines": {
    "node": ">=10.16.0 <=14.x.x",
    "npm": "^6.0.0"
  }

and I got the following error:

unable to invoke layer creator
parsing package npm version range ^6.0.0: Could not parse Range "^6.0.0": Could not parse comparator "^" in "^6.0.0"
ERROR: failed to build: exit status 1

When I removed the caret (^), from before 6.0.0, the deployment worked just fine. Using the caret (^) is a common thing in package.json, but for some reason it is not working here. What’s up with that?

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