Newman "newman: command not found" on the runner in CI

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

The shell could not find a newman executable on PATH because the Postman CLI was never installed on the runner. Node is present, but Newman is a separate npm package.

What this error means

A step calling newman run ... fails with "newman: command not found" and the job exits with code 127.

/home/runner/work/_temp/script.sh: line 1: newman: command not found
Error: Process completed with exit code 127.

Common causes

Newman was never installed on the runner

Newman is not preinstalled on hosted runners. Without an explicit npm install -g newman step it is absent from PATH.

A local install is not on PATH

A project-local npm install newman puts the binary under node_modules/.bin, which is not on PATH unless you call it through npx or a script.

How to fix it

Install Newman globally, then run it

1. Add a step that installs newman globally with npm.
2. Optionally install the HTML/JUnit reporter you need alongside it.
3. Run the collection in a later step.

- run: npm install -g newman newman-reporter-htmlextra
- run: newman run collection.json -e ci.postman_environment.json

Run Newman through npx without a global install

npx fetches and runs Newman on demand, avoiding a separate install step.

npx newman run collection.json -e ci.postman_environment.json

How to prevent it

• Install Newman explicitly in the workflow before the run step.
• Prefer npx newman when you do not want a global install.
• Pin the Newman version so runs are reproducible.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions documentation