Local package.json exists, but node_modules missing

npm start runs a script that the app maker built for easy starting of the app npm install installs all the packages in package.json

run npm install first

then run npm start

Just had the same error message, but when I was running a package.json with:

"scripts": {
    "build": "tsc -p ./src",
}

tsc is the command to run the TypeScript compiler.

I never had any issues with this project because I had TypeScript installed as a global module. As this project didn't include TypeScript as a dev dependency (and expected it to be installed as global), I had the error when testing in another machine (without TypeScript) and running npm install didn't fix the problem. So I had to include TypeScript as a dev dependency (npm install typescript --save-dev) to solve the problem.