Today after running some apt upgrades my Laravel development environment failed to compile because of a newer version of nodejs than I currently require.

Module build failed: ModuleBuildError: Module build failed: Error: Missing binding /home/paulb/itsm/node_modules/node-sass/vendor/linux-x64-64/binding.node
Node Sass could not find a binding for your current environment: Linux 64-bit with Node.js 10.x

Found bindings for the following environments:
  - Linux 64-bit with Node.js 8.x

This usually happens because your environment has changed since running `npm install`.
Run `npm rebuild node-sass` to download the binding for your current environment.

Turns out that Debian Buster now includes Node v10 in its repository and that overwrote my Node v8 that is used in my development. To resolve it I needed to revert back to v8 and to do this I needed to use version pinning in apt.

By using apt-cache to check the policy for nodejs I can see that I have two possible sources for it, the debian repository and the nodesource repository.

$ apt-cache policy nodejs
 nodejs:
   Installed: 10.15.1~dfsg-2
   Candidate: 10.15.1~dfsg-2
   Version table:
  *** 10.15.1~dfsg-2 500
         500 http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
      8.15.0-1nodesource1 500
         500 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x buster/main amd64 Packages

From looking at the version entries *** 10.15.1~dfsg-2 500 both of these packages have the same priority of 500. I need to make my 8.15 version a higher priority to ensure it gets installed instead.

To set the priority I created a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/nodejs and put in the following content:

Package: nodejs
Pin: version 8.*
Pin-Priority: 1000

This gives version 8.* a priority of 1000.

$ apt-cache policy nodejs                                                    
 nodejs:
   Installed: 10.15.1~dfsg-2
   Candidate: 8.15.0-1nodesource1
   Version table:
  *** 10.15.1~dfsg-2 500
         500 http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
      8.15.0-1nodesource1 1000
         500 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x buster/main amd64 Packages

Now I need to remove and reinstall nodejs and can see that the version of node now called is back to version 8 as required.

$ sudo apt-get remove nodejs 
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
$ node -v
v8.15.0