npm peerDependency issue with grunt and flatiron peer

Question

While posting this question I figured out the answer, but I'll post both here in case it helps someone else, and perhaps someone can help with the why of what happened.

When I run:

sudo npm install -g grunt

the last part of it says:

/usr/bin/grunt -> /usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/bin/grunt
npm ERR! peerinvalid The package flatiron does not satisfy its siblings' peerDependencies requirements!
npm ERR! peerinvalid Peer [email protected] wants flatiron@~0.1.9
npm ERR! peerinvalid Peer [email protected] wants flatiron@~0.1.9

npm ERR! System Linux 3.5.0-23-generic
npm ERR! command "nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "-g" "grunt"
npm ERR! cwd /home/explunit
npm ERR! node -v v0.8.19
npm ERR! npm -v 1.2.9
npm ERR! code EPEERINVALID
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/explunit/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0

As you can see in the above, I am on node 0.8.19 and npm 1.2.9 (the latest that comes down from ppa:chris-lea on Ubuntu 12.10).

Other things I tried:

• Did the same on a fresh Ubuntu install. No errors. The script output looks the same until those last few error lines.
• Ran "sudo npm cache clean" and tried again. No luck.
• Ran "npm list" and there was nothing else listed

Answer 1

My mistake was not appending the -g on the npm list command.

npm list -g

Once I did that, I saw my list of globally installed modules (e.g. bower, jshint, mocha), and at the very end:

npm ERR! peer invalid: [email protected] /usr/lib/node_modules/jitsu/node_modules/flatiron
npm ERR! not ok code 0

Then I ran this command to see which ones were using flatiron:

npm list -g flatiron

In this case it was jitsu, a module I'm not using anymore. I ran

sudo npm uninstall -g jitsu
sudo npm uninstall -g grunt

And then ran the original command again. Note for anyone coming later to this question: The correct module for reinstalling grunt command-line globally after the release of 0.4 is now grunt-cli, NOT grunt like when I asked the original question.

If I actually wanted to keep jitsu I could have updated it instead of uninstalling it (thanks @BenAtkin):

npm install -g jitsu

And then run the original command again. See this blog post about peerDependency being added in node 0.8.19 for more background.

Answer 2

If you don't mind keeping jitsu installed, you can just upgrade jitsu and this should work.

npm install -g jitsu
npm install -g grunt-cli