SharePoint Workbench on Mac

I’ve been working my way through an excellent book about developing using the new SharePoint Framework. There’s a tool called the SharePoint Workbench which runs locally on your machine and allows you to test your web parts on a SharePint looking canvas quickly without having to go through the full deployment process into your SharePoint Online tenant.

I was struggling with this for quite a few days with Safari complaining that it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the workbench:

https://localhost:4321/temp/workbench.html

Turns out the solution was very simple – I had installed the latest stable version of Node.js which was the wrong thing to do. I wrongly assumed that the SharePoint Workbench would work fine with this latest stable version but that turns out not to be the case. All I had to was downgrade node and voila – workbench works. Here’s the commands I used through the terminal:

sudo npm cache clean -f

sudo npm install -g n

sudo n 6.12.0

So if you’re struggling with the SharePoint Workbench on your Mac, try this trick.