Hung-Yi’s Notes

Volta Tree-Sitter Executable Not Found in Neovim

2 min read

After upgrading to LazyVim 15.x, the following error appeared during nvim-treesitter parser installations:

Error during "tree-sitter build": error: Could not locate executable `tree-sitter` in your project.
Please ensure that all project dependencies are installed with `npm install` or `yarn install

Many users encountered this issue, and most users fixed it by installing tree-sitter-cli which puts a tree-sitter binary on the PATH. This is a hard requirement of the latest version of nvim-tree-sitter

But for me, this occurred despite the tree-sitter binary being available on the system PATH when tested in a regular shell (where.exe tree-sitter worked fine).

Apparent Root Cause

The issue might stem from Volta’s shimming strategy. Volta manages Node.js versions and global executables by creating shims that dynamically route to the appropriate tools through the Volta executable itself. However, in this particular case, it appears that Neovim fails to use these shims correctly, effectively making it “blind” to Volta-managed executables in certain situations. This might only be a problem on Windows.

Confirmed Solution

Switch from Volta to nvm-windows:

  1. Uninstall Volta
  2. Remove any Volta related directories from the PATH
  3. Install nvm-windows
    • Follow standard nvm-windows installation
    • Ensure tree-sitter-cli is installed globally:
      • nvm install lts
      • nvm use lts
      • npm install -g tree-sitter-cli
  4. Verify with where.exe tree-sitter. It should no longer point to a volta directory; if it does, restart terminal, or even safer, restart Windows entirely.
  5. Start Neovim and reinstall parsers with :TSUpdate if it doesn’t automatically trigger

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