NOTE TO EDITOR: Once again your output rate isn’t as you promised. It seems you are reluctant to post anything unless it involves some kind of tutorial. Let’s reiterate – the whole point of this blog is to record snapshots of your learning at as many intervals as possible not just significant ones. A post can be as simple as what you’ve learned, read, or done in the week related to software development. Posts don’t need to be only about things you’ve fully digested – things you don’t quite understand or are in the process of understanding are welcome as well. See to it!

NODE VERSION MANAGEMENT

The Node development pace is quite quick as you can see from their changelogs, therefore at any moment in time we might have different projects in development which we need to test on multiple versions of node or the codebase could rely on a specific node version. This and other scenarios necessitate the need for having a version manager to switch between multiple node versions.

There are two node version managers I know, nvm and n. For quite a while I’ve been using nvm as it was the only one I knew and I liked it enough, but I transitioned to n this week and I love it.

INSTALLATION

There are many ways to install it, but I recommend the third-party install method n-install. I love this approach because it allows for easy updating and uninstallation of n. I recommend you to purge all instances of node and npm in your system prior to installing n. Follow this SO question: Uninstall Node.

curl -L https://git.io/n-install | bash

And that’s it! The latest stable node version and npm will be setup for you. Confirm it like below:

node -v && npm -v
v9.0.0
5.5.1

NOTE: node and npm versions may vary at time you read this.

To update n (if there are any updates) just run n-update, and to uninstall node, npm, and n, n-uninstall.

COMMON COMMANDS

  • n --> list versions installed

  • n latest --> Install or activate latest node release
  • n <version> --> install specific node version
  • n prune --> delete all versions except the current version
  • n rm <version ...> --> remove specific node version(s)

Reference the links above for indepth installation steps and CLI commands for n.