If this is a stupid question, I am sorry, but my code was literally working fine 2 days ago. Load it up today and I get all this bollocks. I am new to node and npm. So I am sorry if this is all just down to version management.
I am on linux ubuntu. I tested it in a new clean project, same error. Even tried to do something (literally just to check version number) in the terminal with npm, same error. I've done some searches which of some seem credible but I can't even do anything with npm at the moment so I can't even uninstall it or clean cache. Yes, I've tried with sudo.
npm does not support Node.js v10.19.0
You should probably upgrade to a newer version of node as we
can't make any promises that npm will work with this version.
You can find the latest version at https://nodejs.org/
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/npm.js:32
#unloaded = false
^
SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token
at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:723:23)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:789:10)
at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:653:32)
at tryModuleLoad (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:593:12)
at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:585:3)
at Module.require (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:692:17)
at require (internal/modules/cjs/helpers.js:25:18)
at module.exports (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/cli.js:22:15)
at Object.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js:2:25)
at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:778:30)
I can also run a new install of node but it will say:
nodejs is already the newest version (10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1).
Some what am I meant to do if these versions are incompatible?
Looks like your distro has a very old version of Node in its repository. If you want to upgrade it you'll need to install it through some other mechanism (such as nvm) and then make sure the new version takes precedence on your $PATH or upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu. -Quentin
This comment by Quentin was 100% the answer.
All I had to do was install NVM (Node Version Manager). Update the node package and everything was fine.
You can find NVM here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#installing-and-updating