Difficulty installing Node.js and CoffeeScript in Mac OSX

Question

I'm having some difficulty installing Node and Coffeescript. I have installed node using homebrew and then I have successfully installed NPM. I have tried to install Coffeescript from NPM and it appears to have worked but then I cannot run coffee

localserver:Documents x$ sudo npm -g install coffee-script
Password:
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/coffee-script
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/coffee-script
/usr/local/share/npm/bin/coffee -> /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/bin/coffee
/usr/local/share/npm/bin/cake -> /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/bin/cake
coffee-script@1.4.0 /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/coffee-script
localserver:Documents x$ coffee
-bash: coffee: command not found
localserver:Documents x$ 

Is there some path environment variable that I need to set for this? Even if I navigate to /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/bin/coffee I cannot run it from here.

Answer 1

Looks like npm doesn't add coffee's directory to the PATH. You can fix it with the following:

export PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/bin/:$PATH

I'm quite sure there must be a better way though. But I don't know enough OSX to answer.

If you want this change to be permanent, add the line to your ~/.profile file.

Answer 2

On Mac OS X, .bashrc is the best place to specify your $PATH ( bashrc vs bash_profile ).

You want to add a path that will work for all (globally installed) Node modules, which would be /usr/local/share/npm/bin . To do that, you can type the following into your shell (where ^D means pressing Control-D to end the input).

cat >> ~/.bashrc

export PATH="/usr/local/share/npm/bin:${PATH}"
^D