Category: Fixes

Should I? Or shouldn’t I? This is what I keep asking myself every time I pack my bags for a vacation, short or long. Do I really need my MacBook Air on Koh Samui? Maybe I’ll get into a situation where a simple iPhone is not enough. Watching a movie, for example. Or writing code.

tl;dr

Downgrade Node.js via nvm from 25.x.x to 24.x.x (LTS):

# Download 24.11.1 (LTS) version
nvm install --lts

# Apply version
nvm use --lts

# Verify Node.js version; should show: v24.11.1
node -v

# Download 24.11.1 (LTS) version
nvm install --lts

# Apply version
nvm use --lts

# Verify Node.js version; should show: v24.11.1
node -v

Install the dependencies with yarn instead of bun:

yarn

yarn

Coding under Coconut Trees

I get it, totally. Sitting on a 28°C-degree tropical island, surrounded by pristine beaches and a forest of coconut trees so high that they almost kiss the sun, doesn’t seem to be the ideal location to open a code editor and look at what other hotel guests may interpret as hieroglyphs.

It’s not only nerdy, but outright sad. “There,” says the toddler to his dad, “he’s playing computer,” pointing at me with his finger. And dad? He says nothing but slowly shakes his head and is—once again—reinforced in his belief that people, the “generation X,” aren’t capable of going anywhere without their digital opium.

“Test Something”

On one hand, he’s right. On the other hand, he’s not. Without drifting off the actual topic like a dinghy in the Gulf of Thailand, I can only say: I had a very good reason.

However, that reason had nothing to do with the error I encountered today for the first time. Long story short, I needed to clone one of my Nuxt 4 projects and run the development server to—let’s keep it vague because it doesn’t matter—test something.

The usual steps:

1. git clone https://gitlab.com/.../project
2. cd project
3. bun i
   

“ERROR TTY initialization failed”

And that’s where it went awry. As a side note: Whenever possible, I use the package manager bun. It works for the vast majority of projects, and it’s blazingly fast, especially once packages have been cached.

But this time, bun i stopped with an error that didn’t really tell me much:

ERROR  TTY initialization failed: uv_tty_init returned EINVAL (invalid argument)

ERROR  TTY initialization failed: uv_tty_init returned EINVAL (invalid argument)

A quick Google search showed that I wasn’t the only one having this problem with the combination bun + Nuxt. The GitHub user corpix proposed a quick fix for this by setting export NUXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED to 1. To me, however, this felt more like a hack than an actual solution, just like other fixes.

What’s uv_tty_init?

So I kept digging. It turns out that uv_tt_init has something to do with Nuxt’s telemetry module (hence corpix’ fix). The module tries to prompt you (via TTY) to opt in/out of analytics during initialization. However, bun has a known bug handling TTY streams on certain platforms(especially Windows, but also in non-interactive terminals), causing this EINVAL error.​

What made things a whole lot clearer was when I tried to install Nuxt via good, old yarn. Reliably, it reported the same error, but this time with some information that could be fixed easily:

The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=18.0.0 <=24.x". Got "25.2.1"
error Found incompatible module.

The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=18.0.0 <=24.x". Got "25.2.1"
error Found incompatible module.

On the Safe Side with LTS

Seems like Node.js 25.x.x doesn’t get along with the telemetry module. Luckily, using the Node Version Manager, or nvm, downgrading to 24.x.x was a matter of seconds. It downloads the LTS version 24.11.1, and developers usually make sure that their code works with the latest LTS.

If you’re not sure whether you have nvm, simply run nvm -v. If it’s installed, it should give you its version number. At the time of writing this, I received 0.40.3.

If the command wasn’t found, it’s quickly installed by running brew install nvm (I’m assuming we’re all on macOS here and have Homebrew installed). Pay attention to the installation, because at the end, you’ll have to copy some lines and add them to your .zshrc. This is what you’ve got to add at the bottom of your .zshrc:

# NVM (Node Version Manager)
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
# This loads nvm
[ -s "/usr/local/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \. "/usr/local/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"  
# This loads nvm bash_completion
[ -s "/usr/local/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \. "/usr/local/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"

# NVM (Node Version Manager)
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
# This loads nvm
[ -s "/usr/local/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \. "/usr/local/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"  
# This loads nvm bash_completion
[ -s "/usr/local/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \. "/usr/local/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"

Done? Great. Then restart your terminal or session, and you should then have access to the nvm command. And now, we

1. download the latest LTS version via nvm install --lts
2. and tell our project to use it by running nvm use --lts

At this time, --lts means v24.11.1. The output in your terminal or console should be:

Now using node v24.11.1 (npm v11.6.2)

And that’s already it. You can leave Nuxt’s telemetry working instead of just suppressing the error, and reinstall your packages with bun i or yarn (or whatever package manager you prefer).

Once all is installed properly, run bun dev or yarn dev and see your beautiful Nuxt page starting up. Grab yourself a fresh coconut while you’re waiting and go to the beach to wash off the nastiness of Node.js error messages.

Enjoy your vacation!