cordova-sqlite-storage npm failure to install

[Steve Husting]

I got this error when installing the plugin:

cordova plugin add cordova-sqlite-storage --save

Plugin "cordova-sqlite-storage" already installed on android.

Installing "cordova-sqlite-storage" for ios

installing external dependencies via npm

npm install of external dependencies ok

Failed to install 'cordova-sqlite-storage':undefined

Error: Expected "/*" or ";" but "/" found.

[Chris Brody]

The output indicates that your project got into some kind of an inconsistent state. For some reason, the cordova-sqlite-storage was already installed on the Android platform but not the iOS platform. If that operation did succeed you may have different cordova-sqlite-storage versions on the Android and iOS platforms.

Unfortunately I cannot really understand what went wrong at the end, and even worse what state your project is in. Note that this is only a problem with the plugins and platforms directories.

I recommend the following general steps to get your project into a consistent and up-to-date state:

• Check the list of plugins in config.xml and plugins directory. You may want to do cordova plugin ls as well.
• Move the existing plugins and platforms directories to a safe temporary location
• Remove any old plugin specifiers from config.xml
• do cordova plugin add <plugin name> --save for each plugin you want to use
• do cordova platform add for the desired platforms

In case of Xcode 8 I found that you also have to do cordova prepare or cordova prepare ios before it will work on iOS. This is also true if you try to build/run on iOS 10 and/or with WKWebView plugin. I think this should be fixed this week in the upcoming Cordova 6.4.0 release. Discussed in:

• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-12046
  
• https://github.com/cordova/cordova-discuss/issues/55
  
• https://github.com/litehelpers/Cordova-sqlite-storage/issues/567
  
• https://github.com/litehelpers/Cordova-sqlcipher-adapter/issues/22
  

I have a couple major project recommendations for the user community in general:

• Do not keep the platforms directory tree in source control.
• Be sure to add all plugins with the --save flag to keep them in config.xml, then there is no need to keep the plugins directory in source control and it should be easier to keep plugins up to date.

I raised https://github.com/cordova/cordova-discuss/issues/56 to fix the CLI guide with the recommendation to add all plugins with the --save flag.