Getting npm: command not found. How do I reinstall NPM when Node is already installed? Where did NPM go?

Question

I'm starting Learn to Build Modern Web Apps with the AngularJS Tutorial and running into issues very early.

I have node installed:

/path/ang-news node -v
v0.10.26

I was using NPM earlier but was running into trouble with Yeoman. I've repeated these steps a while back but Grunt stopped working so I started fresh.

I ran:

$ sudo npm install -g generator-angular

and all the dependencies were installing until I received:

npm WARN package.json [email protected] No repository field.
npm ERR! peerinvalid The package generator-karma does not satisfy its siblings' peerDependencies requirements!
npm ERR! peerinvalid Peer [email protected] wants generator-karma@>=0.8.2

I then tried updating:

$ npm update -g

I should have run this as an administrator. I received tons of error messages, this seemed most pertinent:

npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator.

npm ERR! System Darwin 13.1.0
npm ERR! command "/usr/local/bin/node" "/usr/local/bin/npm" "update" "-g"
npm ERR! cwd /path/ang-news
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.26
npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.3

npm ERR! not ok code 0

Then I tried uninstalling generator-karma and starting fresh:

$ sudo npm uninstall -g generator-karma

but received:

sudo: npm: command not found

$ npm -v
-bash: /usr/local/bin/npm: No such file or directory

My first question is: Why did NPM suddenly disappear?

[EDIT: Kudos to @try-catch-finally to pointing out the havoc that ensues when switching between normal user and sudo when issuing commands. It turns out that I messed up my user environment and NPM was no longer installed.]

My understanding is that NPM is installed when you install Node, so my second question is: How do I reinstall just NPM? I'd prefer not to have to reinstall Node from the beginning.

[EDIT: Kudos to @hawk and @try-catch-finally - it doesn't appear that installing NPM alone is an option, but there are easy ways to reinstall both.]

Answer 1

1. If you have a working node, you can re-install npm

curl -L https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

2. Unfortunately npm update -g does not do what anybody expects. Fixing this is on the npm roadmap, but it's going to take a while.

3. You almost never need to install a package globally, unless (like generator-angular or grunt-cli) you want to use that package as a command.

Answer 2

Just in case you've done this with brew, I recommend this article on github. Will save you a lot of time.

https://gist.github.com/DanHerbert/9520689

Fixing npm On Mac OS X for Homebrew Users Run the following commands to remove all existing global npm modules, uninstall node & npm, re-install node with the right defaults, install npm as its own pacakge, and configure the location for global npm modules to be installed.

rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules
brew uninstall node
brew install node --without-npm
echo prefix=~/.node >> ~/.npmrc
curl -L https://www.npmjs.com/install.sh | sh

Node and npm should be correctly installed at this point. The final step is to add ~/.node/bin to your PATH so commands you install globally are usable. I added this line to my ~/.path script, which gets run via ~/.bash_profile. Run the following line as is.

export PATH="$HOME/.node/bin:$PATH"