Are you getting a “merge conflict marker encountered” error when compiling a Node app? I ran into this issue for the first time recently, which was confusing as I had definitely fixed all previous merge conflicts, and could verify this by searching the codebase for “<<<<“, “>>>>“, “====” etc. and there were none to be found.

How is it encountering something that doesn’t exist, you ask? Beats me as to why, but when ghosts end up in the code I usually suspect the cache first.

So after trying several methods to clear out the issue, the one that seemed to work best was the following:

rm -Rf node_modules/.cache
(then yarn, then yarn start)

App booted up perfectly. Hope this helps somebody out there. I usually don’t come across caching issues in React apps but they sure are weird when they happen.