When Bun Took Over My Node

xxx

Dec 10, 2025

1 min read

A personal debugging story about Bun overriding Node.js commands, what actually caused the issue, and the steps I took to resolve it.

#nextjs

#debugging

#tooling

#experiments

#typescript

The Day Bun Staged a Coup

Sometimes, software doesn’t just fail—it conspires. This week, my Next.js dev server refused to run. The culprit? Bun, the shiny new JS runtime I had casually installed.

Initial Failure

Running the development server with:

resulted in:

That began a long spiral of troubleshooting. I deleted node_modules, reinstalled them, removed Bun globally, tried running Node by its full path—nothing helped. Even npx had turned against me.

At this point, I wasn’t debugging. I was bargaining.

The Plot Twist

Hours later, just when I was out of ideas and free LLM tokens were running low, I uncovered Bun’s secret hideout:

There it was: Bun’s fingerprints on everything. These shims were quietly intercepting node and replacing it with themselves. My entire environment was being rerouted through Bun without my knowledge.

The Cleanup

Turns out the fix was nothing fancy. Just wipe the hideout:

Then I tried again:

Finally brought my server back to life. Imagine that.

Moral of the Story

Bun tried to take over. I fought back. And I learned: curiosity is wonderful… but sometimes it comes with a hidden army in your home directory.

xxx

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