Today I upgraded to node 0.10.15 and just ran npm install on a project I am working on. I started seeing a lot of these failures:

npm - ERR! registry error parsing json
npm - ERR! SyntaxError: Unexpected token <

I had already run the npm install command maybe 30 minutes previously so I thought it might be something to do with the node/npm versions so I did the usual and rolled back. Same issue. Ok so maybe a corrupt module or something? npm cache clean was next. Still no change.

Ok so what the heck is going on? Looking a bit more closely showed that npm appeared to be setting the mime type to html on the reponse. Hang on – the npm registry does not return html. So somewhere along the line a proxy or some other intermediary was setting the type.

Anyway, long story short – reboot of the laptop and we were back in business. I can only guess that, with the various upgrade installs and some other tasks I was running, something caused this mess.

Just one of those things.