node? No such file or directory..

I just wanted to install some software that uses NodeJS, but that failed with the following error:

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

I’ve been sure I installed NodeJS from the repository, so I had a look at the build script of the software that I was about to install. It started with:

#!/usr/bin/env node

As I just discovered, the debian package providing NodeJS installs the binary as:

$ dpkg -L nodejs
/.
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/nodejs
[...]

You see, on my system the NodeJS binary is called nodjs, not node (as assumed by the tool I wanted to install). Easy to work around this problem: Just create a link to nodejs and call it node:

ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/node

I installed the link to /usr/local/bin/node because that’s also in my $PATH and won’t conflict with other software that might provide /usr/bin/node..