While I was preparing to work locally on my website, I did the typical npx gatsby develop and was met with this error:

Error: MDB_PROBLEM: Unexpected problem - txn should abort

Eh?

MDB_PROBLEM? That’s a strange error …

At first I thought I had made a mistake with my markdown files, so I checked all of the ones i changed and couldn’t find anything wrong with formatting. I rebooted my development machine, reverted all of my changes and I was still getting this error.

After doing some research I found a couple of ideas that may also work for you if you have this problem. After each solution, try running the gatsby develop command again to see if it helps.

Solution 1: Clean out the cache

Try cleaning out the Gatsby Cache, then try running

npx gatsby clean

Solution 2: Clear the npm/yarn caches

npm cache clean —force yarn cache clean

Solution 3: Upgrade Gatsby

I was using Gatsby version 4.13.1, and I upgraded to 4.24.4 and thankfully for me the error disappeared.

yarn upgrade gatsby@4.24.4

I’m hoping this helps. If you found another solution that works for you, please post it in the comments to help out other people.