bower command not found

Question

I tried to install twitter bower on my Mac, and I used

npm install bower -g

Then I tried bower --help, and the output was bower command not found. Why is that?

Answer 1

Just like in this question (npm global path prefix) all you need is to set proper npm prefix.

UNIX:

$ npm config set prefix /usr/local
$ npm install -g bower

$ which bower
>> /usr/local/bin/bower

Windows ans NVM:

$ npm config set prefix /c/Users/xxxxxxx/AppData/Roaming/nvm/v8.9.2
$ npm install -g bower

Then bower should be located just in your $PATH.

Answer 2

I am almost sure you are not actually getting it installed correctly. Since you are trying to install it globally, you will need to run it with sudo:

sudo npm install -g bower

Answer 3

Alternatively, you can use npx which comes along with the npm > 5.6.

npx bower install

Answer 4

This turned out to NOT be a bower problem, though it showed up for me with bower.

It seems to be a node-which problem. If a file is in the path, but has the setuid/setgid bit set, which will not find it.

Here is a files with the s bit set: (unix 'which' will find it with no problems).

ls -al /usr/local/bin -rwxrwsr-- 110 root nmt 5535636 Jul 17 2012 git

Here is a node-which attempt:

> which.sync('git')
Error: not found: git

I change the permissions (chomd 755 git). Now node-which can find it.

> which.sync('git')
'/usr/local/bin/git'

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

I am using node version manager. I was getting this error message because I had switched to a different version of node. When I switched back to the version of node where I installed bower, this error went away. In my case, the command was nvm use stable