failing to parse json Bower package.json file

Question

I'm following along with this tutorial https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-and-use-bower-on-your-vps I get the errors you see below. Any ideas what the problem might be?to install Bower on a remote server Ubuntu 13.0.4.. After I install git core, it tells me to run npm install -g bower. When I do that, it gives me an error message about the package.json file. However, I'm wondering if that's an accurate error message because I can install bower on my local machine without problem.

npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/tar
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/unzip
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/tmp
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/update-notifier
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/which
npm ERR! Failed to parse json
npm ERR! Unexpected end of input
npm ERR! File: /home/michael/.npm/rimraf/2.2.2/package/package.json
npm ERR! Failed to parse package.json data.
npm ERR! package.json must be actual JSON, not just JavaScript.
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! This is not a bug in npm.
npm ERR! Tell the package author to fix their package.json file. JSON.parse

npm ERR! System Linux 3.8.0-19-generic
npm ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "-g" "bower"
npm ERR! cwd /home/michael
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.22
npm ERR! npm -v 1.3.14
npm ERR! file /home/michael/.npm/rimraf/2.2.2/package/package.json
npm ERR! code EJSONPARSE
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/michael/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0

The information contained at /home/michael/npm-debug.log is just the standard information contained in the READ.me, which doesn't deal with this problem. Any ideas what might be wrong?

Answer 1

Similar issue (osx though) and this solution worked: https://github.com/bower/bower/issues/877.

do: npm cache clean