Fixing Node, NPM, Gulp, and Laravel Elixir on Ubuntu 14.04

I started getting stack traces when running gulp --production to generate CSS and JS assets for a Laravel 5 project hosted on a Ubuntu 14.04 server. The error was something along the lines of:

/var/www/dev_blog/node_modules/is-number-like/lib/index.js:19 const length = val.length
SyntaxError: Use of const in strict mode.

I went through the following process to try to get NPM, Node.js, Gulp, and Laravel Elixir working successfully once again.

Remove Existing Node and NPM Packages

ubuntu ~ $ sudo apt-get remove --purge node nodejs npm
ubuntu ~ $ sudo apt-get autoremove

Install from Nodesource

While troubleshooting I saw a lot of recommendations to install the packages via Nodesource: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions so I began to follow their install instructions:

ubuntu ~ $ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_7.x | sudo -E bash -
ubuntu ~ $ sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

After running the installation script I checked the package versions:

ubuntu ~ $ node -v
v7.2.1
ubuntu ~ $ npm -v
3.10.9

Remove and Re-install Node Modules

I entered my project directory, removed the node_modules/ directory, and re-ran the npm install command to pull in the modules for the project:

ubuntu /var/www/dev_blog $ rm -rf node_modules/
ubuntu /var/www/dev_blog $ npm install

See If Gulp is Fixed

At this point I ran the gulp --production command and it ran successfully:

ubuntu /var/www/dev_blog $ gulp --production
[16:43:34] Using gulpfile /var/www/dev_blog/gulpfile.js
[16:43:34] Starting 'default'...
[16:43:34] Starting 'styles'...

Fetching Styles Source Files...

resources/assets/css/bootstrap-flatly.css
resources/assets/css/custom-styles.css

Saving To...

public/css/all.css

[16:43:36] Finished 'default' after 2.2 s
[16:43:37] Finished 'styles' after 3.5 s
[16:43:37] Starting 'scripts'...
Fetching Scripts Source Files...

resources/assets/js/jquery.min.js
resources/assets/js/bootstrap.min.js
resources/assets/js/moment.min.js
resources/assets/js/bootstrap-datetimepicker.js

Saving To...

public/js/all.js

[16:43:43] Finished 'scripts' after 5.41 s
[16:43:43] Starting 'version'...
Fetching Version Source Files...

public/css/all.css
public/js/all.js

Saving To...

public/build

[16:43:43] Finished 'version' after 54 ms
[16:43:43] Starting 'copy'...
Fetching Copy Source Files...

public/fonts/**/*

Saving To...

public/build/fonts

[16:43:43] Finished 'copy' after 45 ms

Great success.

Relevant Files

Here is the gulpfile.js for reference:

process.env.DISABLE_NOTIFIER = true;

var Promise = require('es6-promise').Promise;
var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');
/*
 |