How can I install npm and Node.js on Ubuntu?

Question

I have installed Node.js by:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Installation is done well and when I try to install npm,

sudo apt-get install npm

I receive this output:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 npm : Depends: node-gyp (>= 0.10.9) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

What can I do with this?

When I run npm --version, the output is following:

The program 'npm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:

sudo apt install npm

Answer 1

TL;DR

nodejs needs libssl1.0-dev, which cannot be installed when libcurl4-openssl-dev or libssl-dev are already installed.

The solution is to ununinstall libcurl4-openssl-dev and libssl-dev, or install libssl1.0-dev which forces the others to be removed.

Full Story

I had the same problem, so I tried to manually install each package it complains about along the way.

$ sudo apt install npm
...
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 npm : Depends: node-gyp (>= 0.10.9) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
$ sudo apt install node-gyp
...
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 node-gyp : Depends: nodejs-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
$ sudo apt install nodejs-dev
...
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nodejs-dev : Depends: libssl1.0-dev (>= 1.0.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
$ sudo apt install libssl1.0-dev
...
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libssl1.0-dev
0 to upgrade, 1 to newly install, 2 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
Need to get 1,364 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,017 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 libssl1.0-dev amd64 1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.1 [1,364 kB]
Fetched 1,364 kB in 4s (368 kB/s)
(Reading database ... 323301 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing libcurl4-openssl-dev:amd64 (7.58.0-2ubuntu3.3) ...
Removing libssl-dev:amd64 (1.1.0g-2ubuntu4.1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libssl1.0-dev:amd64.
(Reading database ... 323196 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libssl1.0-dev_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libssl1.0-dev:amd64 (1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.1) ...
Setting up libssl1.0-dev:amd64 (1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2) ...

And voilà:

$ sudo apt install npm
...
The following additional packages will be installed:
  gyp libc-ares2 libhttp-parser2.7.1 libjs-async libjs-inherits libjs-node-uuid libuv1 libuv1-dev node-abbrev node-ansi node-ansi-color-table node-archy node-async node-balanced-match node-block-stream
  node-brace-expansion node-builtin-modules node-combined-stream node-concat-map node-cookie-jar node-delayed-stream node-forever-agent node-form-data node-fs.realpath node-fstream node-fstream-ignore
  node-github-url-from-git node-glob node-graceful-fs node-gyp node-hosted-git-info node-inflight node-inherits node-ini node-is-builtin-module node-isexe node-json-stringify-safe node-lockfile
  node-lru-cache node-mime node-minimatch node-mkdirp node-mute-stream node-node-uuid node-nopt node-normalize-package-data node-npmlog node-once node-osenv node-path-is-absolute node-pseudomap node-qs
  node-read node-read-package-json node-request node-retry node-rimraf node-semver node-sha node-slide node-spdx-correct node-spdx-expression-parse node-spdx-license-ids node-tar node-tunnel-agent
  node-underscore node-validate-npm-package-license node-which node-wrappy node-yallist nodejs nodejs-dev nodejs-doc
Suggested packages:
  node-hawk node-aws-sign node-oauth-sign node-http-signature
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gyp libc-ares2 libhttp-parser2.7.1 libjs-async libjs-inherits libjs-node-uuid libuv1 libuv1-dev node-abbrev node-ansi node-ansi-color-table node-archy node-async node-balanced-match node-block-stream
  node-brace-expansion node-builtin-modules node-combined-stream node-concat-map node-cookie-jar node-delayed-stream node-forever-agent node-form-data node-fs.realpath node-fstream node-fstream-ignore
  node-github-url-from-git node-glob node-graceful-fs node-gyp node-hosted-git-info node-inflight node-inherits node-ini node-is-builtin-module node-isexe node-json-stringify-safe node-lockfile
  node-lru-cache node-mime node-minimatch node-mkdirp node-mute-stream node-node-uuid node-nopt node-normalize-package-data node-npmlog node-once node-osenv node-path-is-absolute node-pseudomap node-qs
  node-read node-read-package-json node-request node-retry node-rimraf node-semver node-sha node-slide node-spdx-correct node-spdx-expression-parse node-spdx-license-ids node-tar node-tunnel-agent
  node-underscore node-validate-npm-package-license node-which node-wrappy node-yallist nodejs nodejs-dev nodejs-doc npm
0 to upgrade, 74 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
Need to get 8,422 kB of archives.
After this operation, 40.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

Answer 2

I had the same issue which I resolved by adding the nodesource repo

sudo curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt-get install nodejs

Answer 3

Could you check if npm is already on your system ? If so, update it. That might work.

npm -v
sudo npm install npm@latest -g

Okay, I see in your edited post that npm is not there. I would recommend a quick update of your Ubuntu system.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

And then install Node.js again:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_9.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Note, the command above is for Node.js version 9, but replace it with 8 if you need that.

Answer 4

Here's a pretty good guide of getting up and running with the latest version of Node.js using Ubuntu:

How To Install Node.js on Ubuntu 18.04

The guide covers both the installation of a PPA or, if you're allergic to adding non-official repositories to your Ubuntu installation, it also tells you how you can download and run nvm, which will do the heavy lifting of getting a local instance of whichever version of Node.js you choose running in your /home directory.