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

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 mongo#0.1.0 No repository field.
npm ERR! peerinvalid The package generator-karma does not satisfy its siblings' peerDependencies requirements!
npm ERR! peerinvalid Peer generator-angular#0.9.1 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

If you have a working node, you can re-install npm
curl -L https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
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.
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"

Answer 3

I met the exactly same problem after execute command to install the npm with latest version on redhat 7.1:
npm install npm#latest -g
after some tries i found the solution:
yum reinstall npm
I hope this could help redhat/centos users.