express command not found in bash after installing

Question

just installed new ubuntu vm to test around with node installed things in this order:

node
mongodb-server
npm
express
mongoose

now, trying to create a new app i noticed express cannot be used in the shell. express -v returns express: command not found

i installed npm like this

curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

and i installed express this way

npm install express

any ideas?

Answer 1

npm install express -g

You need to install it globally.

Npm 1.0 installs modules locally by default. So the bash executable lives in /node_modules/bin/. You can add that folder to PATH or you can just install express globally so that it's picked up by PATH

Answer 2

I had this problem and was installing node via Homebrew. The problem was being caused by Homebrew.

So I did:

brew uninstall node

and then installed node using the installer on the nodejs.org site.

Then I ran:

npm install -g express

And voila no problems.

Answer 3

Starting from express 4.00 you also need to install express generator with:

npm install -g express-generator

Only after this will you be able to run express as a command!

For confirmation see: ExpressJS.com - Migrating to Express 4

Answer 4

With the release of Express 4.0.0 it looks like you need to do sudo npm install -g express-generator.

Answer 5

I had to do a combination of things:

1) From node.js modules path:

echo 'export NODE_PATH="'$(npm root -g)'"' >> ~/.bash_profile && . ~/.bash_profile

This sets the file path in bash profile (can be viewed using nano .bash_profile

2) Slightly modified from Raynos (above) since I needed sudo:

sudo npm install express -g

3) Slightly modified from Fazi (above0 since I needed sudo:

sudo npm install -g express-generator

TEST YOUR APPLICATION: run DEBUG=myapp:* npm start

Ref: http://expressjs.com/en/starter/generator.html

Answer 6

EDIT 2017-06-29: this answer is 6+ years old, but still gets votes/traffic. Instead (for any new users with problems) I'd trust both NODE_PATH official doc and its corresponding bit about REPL usage before this answer.

Quite similar to this issue, node was not finding my global express install, so a require('express') statement would fail.

What fixed this for me, when a global install wasn't being picked up by node was making sure NODE_PATH env. variable was is set correctly. On Ubuntu 11.04, with node version 0.5.0-pre, the paths me were:

NODE_PATH=/usr/local/lib/node_modules:/usr/local/lib/node

So, to clarify you might want to export the above env. variable, or you can just test the above values out by doing:

NODE_PATH=/usr/local/lib/node_modules:/usr/local/lib/node node ./you_app.js