Installing Bower on Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to install Bower on XUbuntu 13.10, following the instructions on the Bower home page, after doing sudo apt-get install npm and sudo npm install -g bower I get the following after issuing bower on the command line:

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

I then install Node (even though I assume that would not be unnecessary since Bower's only dependency would be NPM, correct?). Anyhow, after I install node with sudo apt-get install node any of the Bower commands, such as bower help, simply don't do anything, i.e. output nothing.

How to install Bower on Ubuntu (preferably without manually downloading various versions of things)?

Answer 1

The published responses are correct but incomplete.

Git to install the packages we first need to make sure git is installed.

$ sudo apt install git-core

Bower uses Node.js and npm to manage the programs so lets install these.

$ sudo apt install nodejs

Node will now be installed with the executable located in /etc/usr/nodejs.

You should be able to execute Node.js by using the command below, but as ours are location in nodejs we will get an error No such file or directory.

$ /usr/bin/env node

We can manually fix this by creating a symlink.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Now check Node.js is installed correctly by using.

$ /usr/bin/env node
>

Some users suggest installing legacy nodejs, this package just creates a symbolic link to binary nodejs.

$ sudo apt install nodejs-legacy

Now, you can install npm and bower

Install npm

$ sudo apt install npm

Install Bower

$ sudo npm install -g bower

Check bower is installed and what version you're running.

$ bower -v
1.8.0

Reference:

Install Bower Ubutu 14

Install Bower in Ubuntu

Install Bower

Answer 2

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

or install legacy nodejs:

sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy

As seen in this GitHub issue.