On Ubuntu, there’s a little confusion with the name of the NodeJS interpreter. Initially, it was called node, but to avoid clashes with another package, it got renamed to nodejs.
Problem
The problem arises when using npm to install packages. The npm expects to find an interpreter named node, but since it’s been renamed to nodejs, npm gets puzzled and shows an error saying it can’t find node.
The error
sh: 1: node: not found npm WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary "node" npm WARN For further explanations, please read /usr/share/doc/nodejs/README.Debian
But don’t worry! The solution is to create a link or a nickname (called an alias) for nodejs and name it node. This way, when npm looks for node, it’ll find nodejs happily doing its job.
Once you set this up, npm will understand that nodejs is already installed and working smoothly, even though the name is slightly different.
Solution
To fix this issue, you can create a symbolic link so that when npm looks for node, it points to nodejs, which is already installed on your system.
Follow the steps below to do that.
Find the path
First of all, find the path where the NodeJS binary is located. Execute the below command to find the path.
which nodejs
This will give you the path to the NodeJS binary, such as /usr/bin/nodejs.
Create the symbolic link
Now, create a symbolic link that points to the nodejs binary using the ln command. Here is the command below to do that.
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
The above command will create a symbolic link named node in the /usr/bin directory that points to the nodejs executable.
Replace /usr/bin/nodejs with the actual path you found in the first step.
After running this command, try installing packages using npm again, and it should work without the node not found error.