E: Unable to locate package npm

Question

When I try to install npm with sudo apt-get install npm, I got following error:

E: Unable to locate package npm

Why

Answer 1

For Debian Stretch, nodejs does not include npm, and to install it as a separate package, you have to enable stretch-backports.

echo 'deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main' |
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/stretch-backports.list
apt-get update -y
apt-get -t stretch-backports install -y npm

In Buster, npm is a regular package, so going forward, this should just work. But some of us will still be stuck partially on Stretch boxes for some time to come.