It's not clear in the documentation that if you fork a project that was generated by abcweb and you've never generated an abcweb project before (run the abcweb new command which runs npm install) that you will need to manually run npm install in the root of the generated app to install the deps defined in package.json
This should probably be run every time abcweb deps is run, since that is usually the first point of call to get your deps up to date on a fresh system. It should check if the package.json file exists before running it.