I decided on my development system, that I had so much junk in the npm repo, generated while learning how to write custom nodes for NR, I would clean stuff up. So I removed NR (just case I could), removed npm, removed nodejs, just in case something was hanging around. I then installed NR, the approved way, and saw some thing that really made me laugh, really funny (at least to me)...
Running Node-RED install for user pi at /home/pi on raspbian
This can take 20-30 minutes on the slower Pi versions - please wait.
Stop Node-RED ✔
Remove old version of Node-RED ✔
Remove old version of Node.js ✔ v0
Update Node.js LTS ✔ Node v12.18.2 Npm 6.14.5
Clean npm cache ✔
Install Node-RED core ✔ 1.1.2
Move global nodes to local -
Install extra Pi nodes ✔
Npm rebuild existing nodes -
Add shortcut commands ✔
Update systemd script ✔
Any errors will be logged to /var/log/nodered-install.log
All done.
You can now start Node-RED with the command node-red-start
or using the icon under Menu / Programming / Node-RED
Then point your browser to localhost:1880 or http://{your_pi_ip-address}:1880
Started Wed 22 Jul 2020 01:12:29 PM UTC - Finished Wed 22 Jul 2020 01:14:37 PM UTC
The remove (node.js) version 0 reference just cracked me up!