bower is not recognised as an internal or external command

Question

I have successfully installed nodejs, and express framework, however I downloaded bower via

npm install -g bower

which ran successfully.

Answer 1

Although we have already good answers here, I will give an extra hint. Check if you have a .npmrc file inside the folder /Users/YOUR_USER/. When this problem happened to me, my .npmrc file had this content:

http_proxy=http://:@:
https_proxy=http://:@:
proxy=http://:@:/
https-proxy=http://:@:
prefix = "D:\\\\nodejs"
cache = "D:\\\\nodejs\\npm-cache"

Due to prefix and cache lines, the bower was being installed inside the folder specified in prefix.

SOLUTION: I deleted prefix and cache lines. The I installed bower again with the following command:

npm install -g bower

After that, my bower became global as expected.