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Using the command line: adapt create coursecd my-adapt-coursegrunt build
Expected behaviour
The course should build
Actual behaviour
The course doesn't build with error message:
Fatal error: Unable to find local grunt.
If you're seeing this message, grunt hasn't been installed locally to
your project. For more information about installing and configuring grunt,
please see the Getting Started guide.
A grunt folder has been created, and looks close to identical to the one I used the last time I created a course without error (fw 5.31.0).
The big difference in this new course is that the node modules folder contains only around 12k files (as opposed to over 27k in the last successfully building one). If I swap out the new node modules folder with an old one, the course builds fine, but that's not a great solution.
This issue has been happening for some months now. Attached is a screenshot of my command line but it doesn't mean a whole lot to me to be honest! Anything glaringly obvious in it? What can I do to resolve the issue?
Hi Ollie. Thanks for getting back.
I updated my version of npm, node and grunt-cli to the following:
npm: 10.9.3
node: 22.19.0
grunt-cli: 1.5.0
Then retried `adapt create course` but was still getting the "unable to find local grunt" error when running `grunt build`.
I then tried `npm install grunt --save-dev` in the course root. After that, `grunt build` worked just fine without any errors.

Activity
oliverfoster commentedon Sep 9, 2025
What version of node and npm are you using?
$ node --version$ npm --versionMine is:
chrisgillison commentedon Sep 10, 2025
oliverfoster commentedon Oct 9, 2025
It looks as though
npm installwas not performed on the build after creation. You should not have to install grunt locally using --save-dev.