Installing Emacs Packages From MELPA

Published 12:57am on 18th January 2020
by Max Zlotskiy

This article is for people experiencing issues installing packages in emacs getting the following error:

error: Package "prettier-js" is unavailable

If you look in the *Messages* buffer you will see errors about the package archive you are pulling from, such as MELPA. These errors will complain about being unable to establish a secure connection to the MELPA servers. The reason for this is that the Emacs binaries available for Mac OSX don't come linked with the right version of gnutls. Emacs needs an updated version of gnutls to be able to establish a secure connection to MELPA's servers. If you have Homebrew, simply run the following command:

brew install gnutls

Relevant links:

  1. Having Trouble Opening Emacs
  2. Gnutls Required For Emacs 26.1 on OSX

Tags: emacs howto prettier-js