Bower - error when installing package “Arguments to path.join must be strings”

Question

I just created a node project and am trying to install jquery using bower.

bower install jquery

I get the following error:

bowe         


        

Answer 1

For me npm install -update bower was not sufficient.

I needed to install the version by specifing it explicit:

sudo npm install -q bower@1.3.8

and yes, I had to run this with sudo.

Answer 2

For other people who are still running into this, this did the trick for me:

bower cache clean

Answer 3

Fix: Clear cache and update to Bower 1.3.8.

This is what's going on:

The tmp package updated it's API to return a cleanup callback in addition to just the directory name. Q then squashes the two arguments to the callback into an array, while bower expected just a string for the directory name.

This causes "TypeError: Arguments to path.join must be strings" errors to appear, seemingly non-deterministic, because various spots attempt to use the _tempDir value (now an array) to join into a path.

semver ftw!