I had this same error but only on my staging server not my production environment. nodejs was already installed on both environments.
By typing:
which node
I found out that the node command was located in: /usr/bin/node on production but: /usr/local/bin/node in staging.
After creating a symlink on staging i.e. :
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node
the application then worked in staging.
No muss no fuss.