[Bug]: Tool installation fails - 'No package manager found' when npm installed via nvm

[broediger]

Description

When installing a tool from the marketplace, the installation fails with:

Error invoking remote method 'install-tool': Error: No package manager found. Please install pnpm or npm globally

This happens even though npm is installed globally via nvm and works correctly in the terminal.

Root Cause

On macOS, GUI apps launched from Dock or Finder don't inherit the user's shell PATH. They only see the default system PATH (/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin), which doesn't include paths like /usr/local/bin or ~/.nvm/versions/node/*/bin.

This means the app can't find npm or pnpm even when they're properly installed.

Workaround: Launching PPTB from the terminal via open "/Applications/Power Platform ToolBox.app" works because it inherits the shell PATH.

Suggested Fix

Use the fix-path package to patch process.env.PATH at app startup. This is the standard solution for this problem in Electron apps — it reads the user's actual shell PATH by running a login shell:

import fixPath from 'fix-path';
fixPath();

This should be called early in the main process before any child processes are spawned.

Environment

• OS: macOS 15 (Sequoia)
• Node: v24.14.0 (installed via nvm)
• npm: 11.12.1
• PPTB: latest version

[broediger]

I'd like to work on this — I have a fix ready and will open a PR against dev.

Approach: Instead of using the fix-path package, the fix inlines the PATH resolution directly. fix-path v4+ is ESM-only, which conflicts with the project's CommonJS main process (tsc --noEmit rejects ESM-only imports). Rather than adding a workaround (async dynamic imports introduce a race condition before managers are instantiated), the fix uses execFileSync with the user's login shell to read the real PATH at app startup — this is the same technique fix-path uses under the hood, without the dependency.

Unique delimiters (__PPTB_PATH_START__ / __PPTB_PATH_END__) are used to extract the PATH cleanly, so any shell startup noise (banners, motd, debug echo in .zshrc/.bashrc) is safely ignored.