ERR_UNSUPPORTED_ESM_URL_SCHEME when running renovate on Windows Server

[niklashogia]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

Azure DevOps, [email protected], self hosted windows agents

Please tell us more about your question or problem

We have been running the same setup and config without any problems earlier.

The error ERR_UNSUPPORTED_ESM_URL_SCHEME started showing up in [email protected], i have tested all newer versions up to [email protected] with the same result.

We are running self hosted Azure DevOps agents on Windows Server 2019, node 22.14.0

Our temporary solution is to run [email protected], which works fine.

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

npm warn exec The following package was not found and will be installed: [email protected]
npm warn deprecated [email protected]: This module is not supported, and leaks memory. Do not use it. Check out lru-cache if you want a good and tested way to coalesce async requests by a key value, which is much more comprehensive and powerful.
npm warn deprecated [email protected]: Rimraf versions prior to v4 are no longer supported
npm warn deprecated [email protected]: Glob versions prior to v9 are no longer supported
npm warn deprecated [email protected]: Package no longer supported. Contact Support at https://www.npmjs.com/support for more info.
DEBUG: Using RE2 regex engine
DEBUG: Parsing configs
DEBUG: Checking for config file in config-specialized.js
DEBUG: Parse error
       "err": {
         "code": "ERR_UNSUPPORTED_ESM_URL_SCHEME",
         "message": "Only URLs with a scheme in: file, data, and node are supported by the default ESM loader. On Windows, absolute paths must be valid file:// URLs. Received protocol 'e:'",
         "stack": "Error: Only URLs with a scheme in: file, data, and node are supported by the default ESM loader. On Windows, absolute paths must be valid file:// URLs. Received protocol 'e:'\n    at throwIfUnsupportedURLScheme (node:internal/modules/esm/load:209:11)\n    at defaultLoad (node:internal/modules/esm/load:107:3)\n    at ModuleLoader.load (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:701:12)\n    at ModuleLoader.loadAndTranslate (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:514:43)\n    at ModuleLoader.#createModuleJob (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:538:36)\n    at ModuleLoader.#getJobFromResolveResult (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:306:34)\n    at ModuleLoader.getModuleJobForImport (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:274:41)\n    at onImport.tracePromise.__proto__ (node:internal/modules/esm/loader:577:25)"
       }
FATAL: Error parsing config file

[niklashogia]

The issue is a duplicate of

#34628