Upgraded node and npm via nvm, but old node is still used for global packages

Question

I've been using node 9.3.0 for a long time, but I recently migrated to 10.12.0. Everything went fine, when I do node -v and npm -v I get the correct versions:

Paul-Bergs-Macbook:node paulrberg$ node -v
v10.12.0
Paul-Bergs-Macbook:node paulrberg$ which node
/Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v10.12.0/bin/node
Paul-Bergs-Macbook:node paulrberg$ npm -v
6.4.1
Paul-Bergs-Macbook:node paulrberg$ which npm
/Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v10.12.0/bin/npm

Howeven, when I'm trying to run any npm command, the old version is used. That is:

Paul-Bergs-Macbook:node paulrberg$ npm i truffle -g
/Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v9.3.0/bin/truffle -> /Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v9.3.0/lib/node_modules/truffle/build/cli.bundled.js
+ truffle@4.1.14
added 81 packages from 311 contributors in 1.715s

And:

npm list -g --depth=0
/Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v9.3.0/lib
└── truffle@4.1.14

Not sure if this is some bash code still pointing to the last version, but I can't seem to find any proof for that. Running env and checking for 9.3.0 environment variables yields no result.

What I did so far:

• Delete node 9.3.0 with nvm uninstall 9.3.0
• Do a fresh install of nvm after deleting it and rebooting the computer
• nvm reinstall-with-packages
• Deleted ~/.nvmrc and set 10.12.0 in there afterwards
• Check if I have an overlapping node from homebrew and I don't What could the problem be?

Answer 1

After a few hours of painful Unix debugging, I realised the problem was that I set a prefix in npm config :

prefix = "/Users/paulrberg/.nvm/versions/node/v9.3.0"

If you stumble upon a similar problem, make sure to unset that by doing:

npm config rm prefix

This is indeed mentioned , albeit not necessarily shining on the nvm page:

If you have an ~/.npmrc file, make sure it does not contain any prefix settings (which is not compatible with nvm)

Answer 2

It looks like you might need to run nvm reinstall-packages

https://github.com/creationix/nvm#migrating-global-packages-while-installing

which says

---

Migrating global packages while installing If you want to install a new version of Node.js and migrate npm packages from a previous version:

nvm install node --reinstall-packages-from=node

This will first use "nvm version node" to identify the current version you're migrating packages from. Then it resolves the new version to install from the remote server and installs it. Lastly, it runs "nvm reinstall-packages" to reinstall the npm packages from your prior version of Node to the new one.

You can also install and migrate npm packages from specific versions of Node like this:

nvm install 6 --reinstall-packages-from=5 nvm install v4.2 --reinstall-packages-from=iojs

---

The other "solution" is not to use global packages. Particularly when using nvm and not being able to be sure that the global package is for the "current" version it can be better to install locally and use npx to run the local command

truffle installs a truffle command to ./node_modules/.bin when you npm install it so you can npx truffle to run the local one instead of truffle to run the global one

---

edit:

another thing to check is that node -v and nvm current don't necessarily report the same version.

I wonder if nvm current would report v9.3 for you?

ah, yep, on my machine I can install truffle globally in a different location than node -v reports

 > node -v
v9.5.0
 > nvm current
system
 > nvm use v8
Now using node v8.4.0 (npm v5.3.0)
 > node -v
v8.4.0
 > nvm current
v8.4.0
 > npm install -g truffle
/Users/pauldambra/.nvm/versions/node/v8.4.0/bin/truffle -> /Users/pauldambra/.nvm/versions/node/v8.4.0/lib/node_modules/truffle/build/cli.bundled.js
+ truffle@4.1.14
added 81 packages in 4.364s

So you might be missing an nvm use v10 command

Answer 3

I think that a more permanent solution is this section from the support docs.

Default global packages from file while installing

If you have a list of default packages you want installed every time you install a new version, we support that too -- just add the package names, one per line, to the file $NVM_DIR/default-packages. You can add anything npm would accept as a package argument on the command line.