Had to deal with some issues introduced by bad homebrew installations and possible old NPM installs. My guess is that I probably cheated/screwed up using a sudo install when I should have done something different.
This all started playing with the WebDevStudions WordPress plugin generator for yeoman.
This gist was very helpful – Fixing npm On Mac OS X for Homebrew Users
This entire guide is based on an old version of Homebrew/Node and no longer applies. It was only ever intended to fix a specific error message which has since been fixed. I’ve kept it here for historical purposes, but it should no longer be used. Homebrew maintainers have fixed things and the options mentioned don’t exist and won’t work.
I still believe it is better to manually install npm separately since having a generic package manager maintain another package manager is a bad idea, but the instructions below don’t explain how to do that.
Installing node through Homebrew can cause problems with npm for globally installed packages. To fix it quickly, use the solution below. An explanation is also included at the end of this document.
This solution fixes the error caused by trying to run npm update npm -g. Once you’re finished, you also won’t need to use sudo to install npm modules globally.
Before you start, make a note of any globally installed npm packages. These instructions will have you remove all of those packages. After you’re finished you’ll need to re-install them.
Run the following commands to remove all existing global npm modules, uninstall node & npm, re-install node with the correct defaults, configure the location for global npm modules to be installed, and then install npm as its own pacakge.
# OBSOLETE NOW! DO NOT USE ANY OF THIS! (See first paragraph of the gist)
rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules
brew uninstall node
brew install node --without-npm
echo prefix=~/.npm-packages >> ~/.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 ~/.npm-packages/bin to your PATH so npm and global npm packages are usable. To do this, add the following line to your ~/.bash_profile:
export PATH="$HOME/.npm-packages/bin:$PATH"
Now you can re-install any global npm packages you need without any problems.
If you’re a Homebrew user and you installed node via Homebrew, there is a major philosophical issue with the way Homebrew and NPM work together. If you install node with Homebrew and then try to do npm update npm -g, you may see an error like this:
$ npm update npm -g
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/npm
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/npm
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/npm/1.4.4
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/npm/1.4.4
npm ERR! error rolling back Error: Refusing to delete: /usr/local/bin/npm not in /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
npm ERR! error rolling back at clobberFail (/usr/local/Cellar/node/0.10.26/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/gently-rm.js:57:12)
npm ERR! error rolling back at next (/usr/local/Cellar/node/0.10.26/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/gently-rm.js:43:14)
npm ERR! error rolling back at /usr/local/Cellar/node/0.10.26/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/gently-rm.js:52:12
npm ERR! error rolling back at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:107:15)
npm ERR! error rolling back npm@1.4.4 { [Error: Refusing to delete: /usr/local/bin/npm not in /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm] code: 'EEXIST', path: '/usr/local/bin/npm' }
npm ERR! Refusing to delete: /usr/local/bin/npm not in /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
File exists: /usr/local/bin/npm
Move it away, and try again.
npm ERR! System Darwin 13.1.0
npm ERR! command "/usr/local/Cellar/node/0.10.26/bin/node" "/usr/local/bin/npm" "update" "npm" "-g"
npm ERR! cwd /Users/dan/Google Drive/Projects/dotfiles
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.26
npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.3
npm ERR! path /usr/local/bin/npm
npm ERR! code EEXIST
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR! /Users/dan/Google Drive/Projects/dotfiles/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0
There’s an NPM bug for this exact problem. The bug has been “fixed” by Homebrew installing npm in a way that allows it to manage itself once the install is complete. However, this is error-prone and still seems to cause problems for some people. The root of the the issue is really that npm is its own package manager and it is therefore better to have npm manage itself and its packages completely on its own instead of letting Homebrew do it.
Also, using the Homebrew installation of npm will require you to use sudo when installing global packages. Since one of the core ideas behind Homebrew is that apps can be installed without giving them root access, this is a bad idea.
Another strange issue was caused by installing the generator-plugin-wp yoeman generator on a broken yeoman/npm system. This posted github issue helped. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/10995 This needed a straightforward uninstall, cache clear, and reinstall. I may have reintialized my terminal sessions to drop out of sudo mode. It looked something like:
[code]
$ sudo npm remove -g yo generator-plugin-wp
$ npm cache clean
— can’t remember if I relaunched terminal to drop out of sudo mode.
$ npm install -g generator-plugin-wp
[/code]
I’ll be testing this yeoman generator on the side for a while: https://github.com/WebDevStudios/generator-plugin-wp