Problems updating bower to the latest version

Question

I am using bower

$ bower -v
0.9.2

latest version of bower is 1.x.x https://github.com/bower/bower/releases

I run to update bower to

Answer 1

There could be a lot of moving parts here. First you should try

npm cache clean
sudo npm cache clean
npm update -g bower

…which is –given all the moving parts– not very likely to work for you.

On Mac, using brew and nvm with some history, you would do something like this:

1. figure out where bower is now

 $ which bower
 /usr/local/share/npm/bin/bower
 $ ls -hal /usr/local/share/npm/bin/bower
 lrwxr-xr-x  1 iwein  admin    35B Dec 15  2013 /usr/local/share/npm/bin/bower -> ../lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower
 $ ls -hal /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower 
 -rwxr-xr-x  1 iwein  staff   3.3K Sep 17  2013 /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower
 $ bower -v
 1.2.8
 $ rm -rf /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/bower

2. reinstall bower using npm

 $ npm install -g bower
 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/bin/bower -> /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower
 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/lib
 └── bower@1.7.9

 $ bower -v
 bash: /usr/local/share/npm/bin/bower: No such file or directory
 $ which bower
 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/bin/bower
 $ bower
 bash: /usr/local/share/npm/bin/bower: No such file or directory
 $ ls -hal ~/.nvm/v5.11.1/bin/bower
 lrwxr-xr-x  1 iwein  staff    35B Jun  1 11:53 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/bin/bower -> ../lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower

3. open a new terminal

…or source your .profile or whatever. Check if you're using the same node version (implying a different nvm version if you don't)

 $ which bower
 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v0.10.24/bin/bower
 $ bower -v
 1.4.1
 $ nvm use 5
 Now using node v5.11.1
 $ which bower
 /Users/iwein/.nvm/v5.11.1/bin/bower
 $ bower -v
 1.7.9

And you're good.

Note that:

1. you have to make sure you are installing in the right place, you may need multiple versions of bower, nvm, npm or node on your system for different projects…
2. you need to restart the terminal to make sure the linking is done correctly.