gulp -v throwing error after installation

Question

I'm trying to use gulp on my Vagrant machine (Ubuntu box), and therefore installed it like this:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
sudo npm install -g gulp

But upon trying gulp -v I got this:

vagrant@laravel:/var/www$ gulp -v

node.js:201
        throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick
              ^
Error: Cannot find module 'optimist'
    at Function._resolveFilename (module.js:332:11)
    at Function._load (module.js:279:25)
    at Module.require (module.js:354:17)
    at require (module.js:370:17)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp:4:10)
    at Module._compile (module.js:441:26)
    at Object..js (module.js:459:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:348:32)
    at Function._load (module.js:308:12)
    at Array.0 (module.js:479:10)
    at EventEmitter._tickCallback (node.js:192:41)

So I additionally ran sudo npm install -g optimist. The above error was solved, but now I'm stuck with this:

vagrant@laravel:/var/www$ gulp -v

node.js:201
        throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick
              ^
TypeError: undefined is not a function
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp:26:12
    at Array.filter (native)
    at getGulpFile (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp:25:6)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp:8:18)
    at Module._compile (module.js:441:26)
    at Object..js (module.js:459:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:348:32)
    at Function._load (module.js:308:12)
    at Array.0 (module.js:479:10)
    at EventEmitter._tickCallback (node.js:192:41)

Any ideas? Thank you!

PS. These are the versions running:

vagrant@laravel:/var/www$ node -v
v0.6.12
vagrant@laravel:/var/www$ npm -v
1.1.4

Answer 1

Your NodeJS version is too old. This could very well be the problem, Gulp seems to run only on >= 0.9.

This is due to the apt-get package being quite out of date, you can get the newest version with this Vagrant script:

config.vm.provision :shell, inline: "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js"
config.vm.provision :shell, inline: "sudo apt-get update"
config.vm.provision :shell, inline: "sudo apt-get install -y nodejs --no-install-recommends"

A example of a working Vagrant file with the newest node can be found here.

There are other ways of getting the newest Node version, but this one should work.