I fixed my own issue. Apparently some install scripts fail when run as root (or with sudo). I'm not sure why this is the case, but I got everything to work by running sudo chown -R ralph:www-data /path/to/nodebb && ./nodebb upgrade as a standard user.

@mudmanc4 Thanks!

Looks like you do not have write access to the volume your NodeBB is installed in.

NodeBB w/ MongoDB still works just fine even though the kerberos dependency doesn't build, it just means you can't connect to MongoDB servers utilising kerberos authentication. Would prefer not to have to add libkrb5-dev to the list of dependencies, so investigating alternatives...

Definitely seems like cache issue with the record for express-session. try sudo npm cache clean? After that try manually clearing the cache files?

Fixed by reinstalling redis-server.

@a_5mith @Ted Now now play nice, upvotes for the both of you. @Ralkage There's no substitute for the fundamentals. Understanding javascript syntax first will help you in the long run. When I was hiring (way back when in my non-startup days), I'd see lots of devs with "jQuery experience", who couldn't code their way out of a box in plain javascript. @psychobunny and @baris would make fun of me here, because back then I suffered from the same lock-in, except it was MooTools that I was using instead of jQuery XD

@Hưng-Thành-Nguyễn Will ignore. Thank you for confirming!

@julian That's got to be it, thanks mate!