phantomjs version does not seem to be updating - node.js

Question

I have been trying to wrap my head around this problem for awhile now. Was hoping if some of you can help shed some light on the issue.
It all started with me wanting to try out https://github.com/metaskills/mocha-phantomjs.
So I followed the instructions and ran
npm install -g mocha-phantomjs phantomjs
Thinking all was well, I wrote my test code and ran
mocha-phantomjs test.js
Here comes my first problem:
mocha-phantomjs requires PhantomJS > 1.9.1
At first it seems simple enough, I probably just need to upgrade the version on phantom. Looked up the latest version and found it to be 1.9.7-1, so I executed:
sudo npm install phantomjs#1.9.7-1 -g
Now here's my second problem:
$ phantomjs -v
gives me
1.8.1
even though I just installed version 1.9.7-1
I did a quick command to verify that I indeed installed 1.9.7-1, I did this in my project folder:
$ npm ls phantomjs
Project#0.0.1 /home/ubuntu/project
└── phantomjs#1.9.7-1 extraneous
Confused, i did a vim on package.json in /usr/lib/node_modules/phantomjs and got this:
"name": "phantomjs",
"version": "1.9.7-1",
"keywords": [
"phantomjs",
"headless",
"webkit"
]
I did a npm -v in the directory /usr/lib/node_modules/phantomjs and i still got 1.8.1.
Assuming it was an installation, i then did this:
npm rm -g phantomjs
Did a reinstallation and its still 1.8.1..
I am completely stumped. Can anyone help shed some light on this?

Answer 1

I had this same issue and it turned out that I had phantomjs installed as a brew package. You can confirm if this is the same for you by running:
brew ls | grep phantomjs
If you do have phantomjs installed as a brew package you can easily uninstall it:
brew uninstall phantomjs
That should fix your problem.

Answer 2

I had the same issue as the author, but the brew command did nothing, as I hadn't installed it via brew. I couldn't remember how i installed it, so this is how i fixed it
first check current version:
phantomjs --version
1.9.0
Find location of installed phantomjs:
which phantomjs
this will tell you where the version of phantomjs is installed so you can remove it. in my case it was installed here:
/usr/local/bin/phantomjs
so remove this directory:
rm -rf /usr/local/bin/phantomjs
this is enough because the phantomjs directory is self containing
then reinstall phantomjs globally (or locally if you just want it local to your project, then you'd need to link the bin/phantomjs executable in your path or in your javascript which is using phantomjs
npm install phantomjs -g
for global install
or
npm install phantomjs --save-dev
for local install
phantomjs --version
1.9.8
Note that this method will probably only help you if you're using or want to use phantomjs via the NPM wrapper: https://github.com/Medium/phantomjs