Cannot install latest nodejs using conda on Mac

Question

When I run conda search -c conda-forge nodejs, I get:

# Name                       Version           Build  Channel
...
nodejs                        14.2.0      h2c41780_1  conda-forge
nodejs                        14.2.0      h38d8c5a_0  conda-forge
nodejs                        14.3.0      h2c41780_0  conda-forge
nodejs                        14.4.0      h2c41780_0  conda-forge

But when I try to install it using conda install -c conda-forge nodejs it tries to install 6.13.1. Doing conda install -c conda-forge nodejs==14.4.0 also does not work. It keeps trying to "solve" the environment. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Currently, the latest version nodejs 14.x requires icu>=65 which is not yet globally available across conda-forge packages. Therefore it can be installed into a new environment with conda create -n new_env_name -c conda-forge nodejs, but most likely will raise package conflicts in existing environments.

conda install node-js -c conda-forge installing the very old version 6.13.1 seems to be a solver problem. conda install nodejs -c conda-forge --repodata-fn=repodata.json will install a more current version: nodejs-13.x.

Alternative workaround is to use mamba as a conda replacement.

Credits go to Wolf Vollprecht.