The file does not exist at "node_modules/.vite/deps/chunk*" which is in the optimize deps directory.

[someonewithpc]

I'm getting the following message, sometimes, seemingly only after HMR happens a few times:

The file does not exist at "node_modules/.vite/deps/chunk-SZRFMXI5.js?v=f3c2142e" which is in the optimize deps directory. The dependency might be incompatible with the dep optimizer. Try adding it to `optimizeDeps.exclude`.

I haven't been able to find any cause, but as far as I can tell, it didn't result from adding any package, as I haven't done so in a while. It also doesn't happen always, and seemingly only starts happening after HMR, but not after every HMR (HMR as also been really slow)

There's a similar discussion in storybookjs/storybook#28542 but I'm not using storybook

Note: Since I haven't been able to create a minimal reproduction, I can't post this as a bug report

This makes some sense, but I have no idea how I would go about reducing this, tbh...

[efstajas]

Just seemingly randomly started getting the same (with sveltekit). I already completely nuked and reinstalled node_modules. Very strange.

[efstajas]

Clearing cache on the browser fixes it! Strange. Since I've never seen this before and it seems like there is a sudden influx of reports of this recently, I wonder if it's a regression on vite or some other common package.

[reachAkash]

yes, hard reloading works but node modules removal doesn't.

[thearchcoder]

For me clearing cache didin't work, The issue was that the absolute project path contained the symbol "#". So it was like:
~/Documents/Programming/C#/ProjectName

I renamed it to:
~/Documents/Programming/CSharp/ProjectName

And it works now.

[ptumbra]

Is this possibly browser related? Worked with a colleague on this issue today; I was unable to reproduce on my machine and he only saw the issue in Firefox (running 132 but we didn't test other versions). We were able to fix, or avoid, the issue by:

• Switching to a different browser
• Clearing the browser cache in Firefox
• Running Firefox with DevTools open and Disable Cache checked
• Deleting the entirety of node_modules and doing a fresh npm install

[Mario-Eis]

Is this possibly browser related? Worked with a colleague on this issue today; I was unable to reproduce on my machine and he only saw the issue in Firefox (running 132 but we didn't test other versions). We were able to fix, or avoid, the issue by:

• Switching to a different browser
• Clearing the browser cache in Firefox
• Running Firefox with DevTools open and Disable Cache checked
• Deleting the entirety of node_modules and doing a fresh npm install

No, this is not Firefox related. Got it on Brave several times now.

[yaleyang5]

thank you for this reply, clearing cache worked for me!

[yunics-highfield]

Same here. This bug seems to happen when I use dynamic import on local development server. As workaround, I'm trying the 2 ways below. It's gonna happen soon again tho.

1. Reload pages with checking "disable cache" on Network Tab in DevTool.
2. Run npm ci to remove node_modules/.vite and restart vite.

[Bernoulli-IT]

👍🏼 just "disable cache" in developer tools a single time did the trick here 😅

[jimthedev]

Blowing away my node_modules and re-running pnpm i worked for me but this comes back every so often

[Klausdk1999]

Same issue here, removing /node_modules/.vite and npm install solves it until next build or vite --open run

[DaWoelk]

Same issue here. Very annoying.

[jimthedev]

Has anyone stepped back versions to see when it started happening?

[victorz]

Good idea! Do that!

[egel]

fyi: using vite v5.4.9 and this is also happening

[enmanuelmag]

I'm facing the same problem, run npm ci fix the problem but I need to run it always.

[eudoroolivares2016]

We are also running into this issue seemingly at random

[eudoroolivares2016]

Adding this to my vite config seems to help with the issue but, I'm sure I understand the full implications optimizeDeps: { exclude: ['node_modules/.cache'] },

[hasnainvirk]

Worked for me as well. Please shed some light on the implications.

[tordans]

FYI for others: in my Astro App I don't have a .cache folder, so I could not test this. But the general issue is the same.

[tempura327]

optimizeDeps.exclude
Dependencies to exclude from pre-bundling.

According to the document of Vite, we can use optimizeDeps.exclude to avoid some packages from being pre-building.

So that, if we add optimizeDeps: { exclude: ['node_modules/.cache'] } to vite.config.js, Vite will stop executing pre-building.

When you run Vite for the first time, Vite prebundles your project dependencies before loading your site locally

It means that if you switch to the other branch, and the dependencies between 2 branches are different, Vite will check package.json and node_modules, and judge it it’s necessary to execute pre-building again.

Based on above, followings are my guess.


1. It seems that Vite of some versions don’t execute pre-building when we switch to the other branch, so we get the error. (But I have no idea why the issue don’t happen every time.)
2. If I run command vite optimize --force to execute pre-building manually when I get the error, and the error should be blown away.

I tried run the command, and the error is actually blown away.

To sum up, I supposed the error is related to pre-building. And this is why optimizeDeps: { exclude: ['node_modules/.cache'] } works for this issue.

[TargiX]

I had problems with switching between branches before, so I set

 optimizeDeps: {
    force: true,
  },

but now i see this Chunk issues even with this setting on

[JinleeJeong]

Save my life thx :)

[DesiredName]

I also faced the same problem. Vite says it can not find a dependency that is in another project!

[SonnyFishback]

Experiencing the same issue in my SvelteKit app. Resolved by clearing cache and node_modules. Thanks @efstajas

[TargiX]

Same happening randomly when switching between branches with slightly different dependencies

[d-0-t]

Same issue here, it started after upgrading from Angular v17 to 18.2.0, which comes with a new version of Vite I guess.

We work in a monorepo where there is a component library and an app project using the components. Whenever I create a new file that is exported, or change branches without said new files, the bug appears and the web app refuses to load.

Can be temporarily fixed by clearing npm and angular cache, or by disabling caching in the browser. But the moment a file changes, the error comes back.

[t0rbik]

Same issue here. Just started randomly out of nowhere. Deleting node_modules/.vite fixes it for me until it rises again.

UPD: So it happens mostly when I switch branches with different packages installed. Most of the time vite says: Re-optimizing dependencies because lockfile has changed. But when it doesn't see changed lockfile for whatever reason, I end up with the error in question. So I'm trying to workaround with the following now:

  optimizeDeps: {
    force: true,
  },

[rakleed]

I guess it should be fixed in vite@6. See more info: #17336 and #18560

[sedghi]

Not fixed

[albinekb]

Can confirm, got this error on 6.0.1

[sebinsua]

It's actually broken every time I start now... :D

[praticboutic]

I have also have this message when i ran my app on a local Ionic server with "ionic serve" and it crash. However when I ran it in production mode with "ionic serve --prod" it works .

[praticboutic]

The app is not working when i use it from the angular server however i can build it in dev mode on a local Apache server and i can run it and debug it. In this case do not use angular server except in production mode.

[praticboutic]

I ve fixed it by put "optimisation" to "true" in angular.json

[raviVeeraghanta]

We had a similar issue with the @neo4j-nvl. We tried all the suggested changes, and finally, this worked.

1. In optimizeDeps.exclude, we added the @neo4j-nvl package.
2. We set the force attribute to true.
   We started getting errors on the vite console about commonjs modules and older packages that were part of the bundle.
3. We added each package in the optimizedeps.include option ( 7 dependencies).

We tried other things, like disabling prebundling, but that didn't help. We are using nuxt 3.13 and the Vite version (5.4.2) bundled with it.
And as others have seen it works in the production build. So maybe something around the pre bundling that's causing this.

EDIT: Adding info for the production build.
We set the SSR flag to false in the nuxt config. We also upgraded to nuxt 3.15

[MechaGirls]

Please turn off browser Ad blockers like Ad Block, because they can also cause this problem, I'm not sure why, but turn them off and they won't happen

[jigyarth-searce]

For me reinstalling the node_modules didn't work. I tried hard reload in my Chrome and it started.

[WSINTRA]

Started seeing this issue a couple of days ago, went away after a rimraff of node modules, but came back after a few more repo changes in a project.
Related to browser cache. Instead of rm -rf node_modules && yarn install - I decided to reset browser cache (much faster than rimraff node mod and reinstall) clearing browser cache solved issue.

[shafwan-anwer]

Browser cache clearing works. almost spent an hour switching node versions and reinstalling node modules.

[JulioGsn]

I had the same error today. It was not working in Google Chrome, but in Firefox it was Ok. A simple force reload cache did it for me.

[0suyog]

I am getting this on Firefox-nightly, it doesn't show up in normal firefox , opera, chrome, or even firefox-nightly that is installed in wsl.
and it happens like every two reload. First reload shows nothing but second reload shows two same warnings and again third nothing and fourth shows these warnings.

The file does not exist at "/root/react-graphql/node_modules/.vite/deps/prop-types.js?v=c77a829c" which is in the optimize deps directory. The dependency might be incompatible with the dep optimizer. Try adding it to optimizeDeps.exclude.

[martnst]

For me, it was a tricky caching issue. My setup involves a Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel to use my local dev server on a subdomain of main hosting. By default, this involves caching for files, which did eventually link to stale assets. So nothing vite is responsible for, yet the symptoms did lead to this issue.

My solution is to disable the Cloudlfare's cache for my dev subdomain via a custom cache rule.

[kyleratti]

Wow. Can't believe I didn't put this together. I guess I assumed the tunnel had no caching by default (which is a terrible assumption). Thank you for mentioning this!

[digeomel]

We're getting this on an Angular 18 project for a couple of weeks now. I am not sure what changed, definitely not our npm modules. We see it on Chrome and Edge on Linux. One way to get around it, as others have noted, is to disable the browser cache entirely from the network tab in the dev tools. Another way is to delete the .angular cache folder and rebuild the whole project, but this is way too cumbersome and slow.

I hope someone can sort this out.

[NielsCodes]

I've been getting this when switching between branches of a Sveltekit project. Luckily the fix by @eudoroolivares2016 worked for me, but I'm not quite sure of the implications of this setting and of course it would be desirable if it worked out of the box.

[ryanbmarx]

This started happening to me, too. A few months ago, then it went away. Now it's back a couple of times every day. I'm not changing my config or toolchain/deps so It's unclear what the problem is. I use Chrome and Firefox with the same results.

(Vite 5.4, svelte 5, sveltekit 2.5)

[arturhonores]

I had exactly this issue with Vite:

The file does not exist at "node_modules/.vite/deps/chunk-XYZ.js?v=xxxxxx" which is in the optimize deps directory.

In my case, the error appeared after deleting some unused .js files from the project. I double-checked using PhpStorm to make sure there were no remaining imports, but Vite kept trying to load an optimized chunk that no longer existed. I tried all the usual fixes:

Deleting node_modules

Removing package-lock.json

Manually deleting .vite/

Running npx vite --force

None of that worked.

Surprisingly, what actually solved it was a suggestion I found online: clearing the browser cache.

I know it sounds unrelated—but it worked.

Why?
Vite generates URLs like chunk-XYZ.js?v=xxxxx, where ?v= is a version hash. The browser aggressively caches that entire URL. If Vite no longer serves that exact chunk (because you deleted or changed the file), but the browser keeps requesting it... you get this error.

By clearing the browser cache, the browser stops requesting the outdated chunk, and Vite no longer complains.

💡 Conclusion: If you’re getting this error even after cleaning .vite, reinstalling your dependencies, and using --force, try clearing your browser cache. The problem might be on the client side, not in your build setup.

(Thanks to ChatGPT for explaining this mess to me so clearly—it saved me a ton of time.)

[VietLeQuang]

I had the same problem — everything worked fine the first time, but from the second time onward, it broke. I resolved the issue by clearing the browser cache.