npm http-server not working on ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Question

I've been using http-server on Windows for years. Today I installed http-server on ubuntu and it does not work. It initializes exactly as it does on Windows. However, I get an error when I navigate to the local website (http://127.0.0.1:8080). This does not happen on Windows. Any idea how to fix this?

clayton@u20:~/hello-pwa-master$ http-server
Starting up http-server, serving ./
http-server version: 14.0.0
http-server settings: 
CORS: disabled
Cache: 3600 seconds
Connection Timeout: 120 seconds
Directory Listings: visible
AutoIndex: visible
Serve GZIP Files: false
Serve Brotli Files: false
Default File Extension: none
Available on:
  http://127.0.0.1:8080
  http://192.168.4.54:8080
Hit CTRL-C to stop the server
[Sun Dec 12 2021 22:12:15 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)]  "GET /" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.45 Safari/537.36"
_http_outgoing.js:470
    throw new ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT('set');
    ^
Error [ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT]: Cannot set headers after they are sent to the client
    at ServerResponse.setHeader (_http_outgoing.js:470:11)
    at module.exports.ResponseStream.(anonymous function) [as setHeader] (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/http-server/node_modules/union/lib/response-stream.js:100:34)
    at Object.exports.(anonymous function) (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/http-server/lib/core/status-handlers.js:57:7)
    at Readable.stream.on (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/http-server/lib/core/index.js:339:22)
    at Readable.emit (events.js:198:13)
    at emitErrorNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:91:8)
    at emitErrorAndCloseNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:59:3)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:63:19)

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 26 '22 at 20:05

OK, found the solution. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for some odd reason has node v10 installed (current LTS is v16). This version is several years old.

I had to manually uninstall node, as apt uninstall left many orphans (in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/share, /usr/local/lib, and ~).

After completely removing v10, I used curl and apt to download and install node v16.

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs

Now, with V16 installed, http-server works correctly.

npm http-server not working on ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

1 Answers1