Not able to run nodemon (SyntaxError: Unexpected token) on ubuntu

January 18, 2022

command I am running : nodemon server.js,
error I am getting :

nodemon server.js
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/nodemon/node_modules/update-notifier/index.js:58
            } catch {
                    ^

SyntaxError: Unexpected token {
    at createScript (vm.js:80:10)
    at Object.runInThisContext (vm.js:139:10)
    at Module._compile (module.js:616:28)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:663:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:565:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:505:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:497:3)
    at Module.require (module.js:596:17)
    at require (internal/module.js:11:18)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/nodemon/bin/nodemon.js:15:3)

I tried various ways of installing nodemon on Ubuntu but still getting exact same error every time I run.

>Solution :

One reason could be your node.js installation is outdated.
You should upgrade to the recent version of node.js
You can check the version with:

node -v

If the version is recent, then you should try installing nodemon globally with this command

npm install -g nodemon # or using yarn: yarn global add nodemon

If you are stuck in an old version of node.js then do this:

sudo apt-get remove nodejs
sudo apt-get remove npm

Then go to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and remove any node list if you have. Then do a

sudo apt-get update

Check for any .npm or .node folder in your home folder and delete those.

If you type

which node

you can see the location of the node. Try which nodejs and which npm too.

Then do a fresh installation like this

cd ~
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x -o nodesource_setup.sh
nano nodesource_setup.sh
sudo bash nodesource_setup.sh
sudo apt install nodejs