Setting up a new VPS for a small app I'm working on and was stumped by this problem. This didn't happen locally and after discovering the solution I knew why. The reason why is I did not have nodeJs install on the VPS. As I have been working on a nodeJs app in the past few months I already have node installed locally.
I'm running ubuntu and here are the commands to install nodeJs:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
This will install the current stable version of nodeJs. After that I was in business.
