Debian

Debian has been my preferred Linux distribution for a long time (longer than Ubuntu has even existed).

The main reason I like Debian is that its apt package manager has been the most reliable package manager I've ever dealt with, especially when it comes to removing and/or upgrading packages.

NPM

Since I've been playing around with Node and NPM on Windows, I decided I should see if one of my tools works on Linux. Fortunately, I was on Debian 11, which ships with a not-completely-out-of-date Node v12 runtime.

Great, I'll just run sudo apt install nodejs npm and get started! I was immediately greeted with the following wall of packages:

$ sudo apt install nodejs npm
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  at-spi2-core dbus-user-session dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services gsettings-desktop-schemas gyp javascript-common libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatspi2.0-0 libauthen-sasl-perl
  libc-ares2 libclone-perl libcolord2 libdata-dump-perl libdconf1 libdrm-amdgpu1 libdrm-common libdrm-intel1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libdrm2 libencode-locale-perl libepoxy0 libfile-basedir-perl libfile-desktopentry-perl
  libfile-listing-perl libfile-mimeinfo-perl libfont-afm-perl libfontenc1 libgl1 libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa libglvnd0 libglx-mesa0 libglx0 libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common libhtml-form-perl libhtml-format-perl
  libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libhttp-cookies-perl libhttp-daemon-perl libhttp-date-perl libhttp-message-perl libhttp-negotiate-perl libice6 libio-html-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libio-stringy-perl
  libipc-system-simple-perl libjs-highlight.js libjs-inherits libjs-is-typedarray libjs-psl libjs-typedarray-to-buffer libjson-glib-1.0-0 libjson-glib-1.0-common liblcms2-2 libllvm11 liblua5.3-0 liblwp-mediatypes-perl
  liblwp-protocol-https-perl libmailtools-perl libnet-dbus-perl libnet-http-perl libnet-smtp-ssl-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libnode-dev libnode72 libpciaccess0 libproxy1v5 librest-0.7-0 libsensors-config libsensors5 libsm6
  libsoup-gnome2.4-1 libsoup2.4-1 libssl-dev libtie-ixhash-perl libtimedate-perl libtry-tiny-perl liburi-perl libuv1 libuv1-dev libvte-2.91-0 libvte-2.91-common libvulkan1 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 libwayland-egl1
  libwww-perl libwww-robotrules-perl libx11-protocol-perl libx11-xcb1 libxaw7 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-present0 libxcb-randr0 libxcb-shape0 libxcb-sync1 libxcb-xfixes0 libxft2 libxkbcommon0 libxkbfile1
  libxml-parser-perl libxml-twig-perl libxml-xpathengine-perl libxmu6 libxshmfence1 libxt6 libxtst6 libxv1 libxxf86dga1 libxxf86vm1 libz3-4 mesa-vulkan-drivers node-abbrev node-agent-base node-ajv node-ansi node-ansi-regex
  node-ansi-styles node-ansistyles node-aproba node-archy node-are-we-there-yet node-asap node-asn1 node-assert-plus node-asynckit node-aws-sign2 node-aws4 node-balanced-match node-bcrypt-pbkdf node-brace-expansion node-builtins
  node-cacache node-caseless node-chalk node-chownr node-clone node-color-convert node-color-name node-colors node-columnify node-combined-stream node-concat-map node-console-control-strings node-copy-concurrently node-core-util-is
  node-dashdash node-debug node-defaults node-delayed-stream node-delegates node-depd node-ecc-jsbn node-encoding node-err-code node-escape-string-regexp node-extend node-extsprintf node-fast-deep-equal node-forever-agent
  node-form-data node-fs-write-stream-atomic node-fs.realpath node-function-bind node-gauge node-getpass node-glob node-graceful-fs node-gyp node-har-schema node-har-validator node-has-flag node-has-unicode node-hosted-git-info
  node-http-signature node-https-proxy-agent node-iconv-lite node-iferr node-imurmurhash node-indent-string node-inflight node-inherits node-ini node-ip node-ip-regex node-is-typedarray node-isarray node-isexe node-isstream node-jsbn
  node-json-parse-better-errors node-json-schema node-json-schema-traverse node-json-stable-stringify node-json-stringify-safe node-jsonify node-jsonparse node-jsonstream node-jsprim node-leven node-lockfile node-lru-cache node-mime
  node-mime-types node-minimatch node-mkdirp node-move-concurrently node-ms node-mute-stream node-nopt node-normalize-package-data node-npm-bundled node-npm-package-arg node-npmlog node-number-is-nan node-oauth-sign node-object-assign
  node-once node-opener node-osenv node-p-map node-path-is-absolute node-performance-now node-process-nextick-args node-promise-inflight node-promise-retry node-promzard node-psl node-puka node-punycode node-qs node-read
  node-read-package-json node-readable-stream node-request node-resolve node-resolve-from node-retry node-rimraf node-run-queue node-safe-buffer node-semver node-set-blocking node-signal-exit node-slash node-spdx-correct
  node-spdx-exceptions node-spdx-expression-parse node-spdx-license-ids node-sshpk node-ssri node-string-decoder node-string-width node-strip-ansi node-supports-color node-tar node-text-table node-through node-tough-cookie
  node-tunnel-agent node-tweetnacl node-typedarray-to-buffer node-unique-filename node-universalify node-uri-js node-util-deprecate node-uuid node-validate-npm-package-license node-validate-npm-package-name node-verror node-wcwidth.js
  node-which node-wide-align node-wrappy node-write-file-atomic node-yallist nodejs-doc perl-openssl-defaults python3-pkg-resources termit x11-common x11-utils x11-xserver-utils xdg-utils xkb-data

Why?

That's a lot more packages than I was expecting. Wait, x11-common? x11-xserver-utils? What's going on here?

It turns out that Debian's package for NPM depends on something called node-opener, which depends on xdg-utils, which is described as "desktop integration utilities from freedesktop.org". Uh oh. Yeah, that depends on X11.

Why in the world does a command line package manager depend on a GUI environment?

node-opener

So what is this node-opener thing, and does NPM really require it?

The package's web site describes it as "Opens stuff, like webpages and files and executables, cross-platform". I'm still not seeing the relation to NPM. Looking at the code, it's just a script that calls xdg-open on Linux (and other commands on Windows and Mac).

Peering into NPM's source code, I see that it does in fact seem to require('opener'). That's disappointing.

NodeSource to the rescue?

The official nodejs.org site mentions binary distributions from NodeSource. NodeSource helpfully suggests downloading and running their setup script as root.

The script appears to mostly do reasonable things like checking for required packages and then updating apt's sources.list file, and I guess I'm trusting them with the binaries they're providing, so I'll give it a try. They do provide manual install instructions as well.

Success

I can't say I'm pleased with this setup, but NodeSource's Node package did in fact work and now I've got node and npm commands running fine without an X11 installation.