Background

I’m running a Kubernetes cluster in Docker using kind. One of the pods in the cluster is running a React app using react-scripts start. After the console shows ‘Starting the development server’, it throws an error that powershell cannot be found and exits. Below is the stack trace:

 30 node:events:491
 31       throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
 32       ^
 33                                                                                                                          
 34 Error: spawn /mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe ENOENT                                        
 35     at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:285:19)
 36     at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:485:16)
 37     at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21)
 38 Emitted 'error' event on ChildProcess instance at:
 39     at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:291:12)
 40     at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:485:16)
 41     at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21) {                                             
 42   errno: -2,
 43   code: 'ENOENT',
 44   syscall: 'spawn /mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe',
 45   path: '/mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe',
 46   spawnargs: [
 47     '-NoProfile',
 48     '-NonInteractive',
 49     '–ExecutionPolicy',
 50     'Bypass',
 51     '-EncodedCommand',
 52     'UwB0AGEAcgB0ACAAIgBoAHQAdABwADoALwAvAGwAbwBjAGEAbABoAG8AcwB0ADoAMwAwADAAMAAiAA=='
 53   ]
 54 }
 55 error Command failed with exit code 1.

Other Information

I’m using WSL2 with Docker and Ubuntu. Running wsl -l -v gives this:

  NAME                   STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu-22.04           Running         2
  docker-desktop-data    Running         2
  docker-desktop         Running         2

docker context ls returns:

NAME                TYPE                DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT
    KUBERNETES ENDPOINT   ORCHESTRATOR
default             moby                Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   npipe:////./pipe/docker_engine

desktop-linux *     moby                Docker Desktop                            npipe:////./pipe/dockerDesktopLinuxEngine

desktop-windows     moby                Docker Desktop                            npipe:////./pipe/dockerDesktopWindowsEngine

I manually checked the filesystem for WSL and confirmed that the powershell executable is there. After opening a new terminal and running wsl, cd /mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0 and doing ls:

Certificate.format.ps1xml  Help.format.ps1xml             Registry.format.ps1xml  getevent.types.ps1xml      pspluginwkr.dll
Diagnostics.Format.ps1xml  HelpV3.format.ps1xml           Schemas                 ko-KR                      pwrshmsg.dll
DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml  Modules                        SessionConfig           **powershell.exe**             types.ps1xml
Event.Format.ps1xml        PSEvents.dll                   WSMan.Format.ps1xml     powershell.exe.config      typesv3.ps1xml
Examples                   PowerShellCore.format.ps1xml   en                      powershell_ise.exe         zh-CN
FileSystem.format.ps1xml   PowerShellTrace.format.ps1xml  en-US                   powershell_ise.exe.config  zh-TW

Kindly advise how I can go about troubleshooting this. It’s a real headache, any help would be greatly appreciated