Terminals are very powerful, regardless of what operating system you’re using. This means that while you can perform just about any OS task with a few commands, you need to know these commands to take advantage of them. Of course, different operating systems use different languages in their terminals as well, meaning you need to decide to have mastery over one or use multiple.
In this article, we’re talking about Make error 127, its causes and what you can do to fix the problem.
What causes Make error 127?
The Make error 127 generally occurs when you’re working with a Go operator-sdk project cloned from Github as the command doesn’t generate the bin directory with the required files to run the Make installation.
As for code 127, it simply indicates a “command not found” error. Since the initial command hasn’t generated the files required, the Make installation fails as the system can’t find the source files to run or read the command.
Also read: How to fix ‘wget command not found’ issue in Bash?
How to fix Make error 127?
Depending on what’s causing your error, here are two fixes you can try out.
Reinstall a different version of the Operator-SDK
First up, if the problem is being caused by operator-sdk, we can try either rolling back to version 18.0.0 or pushing forward to the latest version available (assuming the latest version has fixed the bug.

All you have to do is uninstall operator-sdk using brew or apt-get or whatever package manager you’re using. Once that’s done, we reinstall a different version (either version 18.0.0 or the latest one) as well as the latest version of Go. Keep in mind that if you’re using version 18.0.0 of operator-sdk, we recommend installing version 1.17.6 of Go.
Finally, check if the bin folder has now been created and if it has, you can go ahead and run your Make installation without any errors.
Check your PATH variables
Since error 127 also indicates that a command or file required to run a command is missing, try checking your PATH variable to see if the command exists there. Alternatively, a simpler way of doing this is opening a terminal in the root directory of whatever command you want to run and then run the problematic command.
Also read: Fix: Error:03000086:digital envelope routines::initialization error