Like any good developer, I use Homebrew to manage my softwares, compilers, and so on. I've also been using the brew installation of node and npm for quite sometimes now.
But every time I tried to update all the packages installed globally with npm, I had the same error saying that npm could not update itself.
Some research on Google brought me to issue #22408. As you can see, this bug is quite common and even if there are different mildly working workarounds...
"...Package managers managing package managers rarely works out well..." - janv
I first tried installing node --whithout-npm, but I found out that I don't really like partial management as I often forget what I need to install when setting up a new machine, npm in that case...
Until...
Node Version Manager
For those familiar with Ruby, it is highly recommended to use a Ruby Version Manager such as rbenv or rvm. It works like a charm when you need to manage different versions of Ruby and/or don't want to screw up the system version of Ruby.
It turns out that something similar exists for node! It is called nvm for Node Version Manager. The good news is that you can install nvm using brew which is exactly what I needed!
So let's get started !
First, pull the latest version of brew by running:
$ brew update && brew upgrade
Then, we simply need to install nvm:
$ brew install nvm
Finally, we need to add the following line to our .profile, .bashrc or .zshrc, to be able to run nvm from the command line:
$ echo "source $(brew --prefix nvm)/nvm.sh" >> ~/.zshrc
And that's it!
Installing node & npm
Installing nvm is not enough, we now need to install node & npm.
To print out the list of all the available versions of node, simply run:
$ nvm ls-remote
We want to install the current stable version which is v0.10.26, so we need to run:
$ nvm install -s v0.10.26
The -s flag means we want to compile node from source.
When the installation process is finished, our brand new node and npm will be installed!
The great thing with nvm is that you can use a different version of node in each of your shell instances. But if you want to stick to the latest version, you can set it as default by running:
$ nvm alias default 0.10.26
Make sure everything is up and running by typing node -v && npm -v.
Conclusion
That's all folks! You can now manage different versions of node/npm without even thinking about it. :)