
To fix it quickly, use the solution below. Installing node through Homebrew can cause problems with npm for globally installed packages. Fixing npm On Mac OS X for Homebrew Users 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. Homebrew maintainers have fixed things and the options mentioned don't exist and won't work. I've kept it here for historical purposes, but it should no longer be used. It was only ever intended to fix a specific error message which has since been fixed. This will set 10.8.3 to the default Node version, system-wide.This entire guide is based on an old version of Homebrew/Node and no longer applies.

Once installed, you can set that Node.js version to be the one to use by typing nvm use 10.8.3 You can install a new Node release (or any old Node release, too) using nvm install, for example: nvm install 10.8.3

To list all the installed versions, run nvm ls. When you use nvm, you can check the current version you are running by typing nvm current, which will give you the same result as node -v. It is also very useful to test your code with old Node versions. It allows you to easily switch the Node version, and install new versions to try and easily rollback if something breaks, for example. Homebrew might ask you to upgrade your xCode version to compile the package. If you did use Homebrew, upgrading Node is as simple as running brew update #makes sure Homebrew is up to date brew upgrade node Homebrew is a very popular way to install Node.js on a Mac. If you installed Node using Homebres (on macOS) The official package contains an installer that will detect the existing version of Node.js and it will overwrite it with the new one. The easiest way to install Node is to download the official package from the Node.js website. If you installed Node using the official package Node.js can be installed in multiple ways on a system, and the upgrade instructions depend on how you first installed it. Find out how to properly upgrade the Node.js version you have installed
