Installing nodejs and npm on linux

Question

I have having a bit of an issue with installing nodejs and npm on my linux server (which is a pi running raspbian). I had everything set up and running using

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

All was fine and dandy, until I found out that apparently these versions are now old. So I removed them

sudo apt-get purge nodejs npm

Then I found the following answer (here) on SO and ran

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Running node -v have me version 0.6.19...which I'm assuming translates to version 6.19 as opposed to version 0. However, running npm -v told me that it was not installed. So I once again purged nodejs, and looked for another solution. At which point I decided to follow the stuff on nodejs's site (here). And I ran the following commands.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_4.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

and

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

2 issues:

1) The version installed was still 0.6.19. I would rather have version 4.x, since that's what I'm running on my dev machine (macOS Sierra).

2) I still don't have npm. Which renders nodejs useless

Any help on either (but preferably 2) would be great. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I really recommend you install node and npm using nvm. This is the fastest, cleanest and easiest way to do it.

That way, you install NVM simply doing:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.31.3/install.sh | bash

To test that nvm was properly installed, close and re-open Terminal and enter nvm. If you get a nvm: command not found message, your OS may not have the necessary .bash_profile file. In Terminal, enter touch ~/.bash_profile and run the above install script again.

And you are now able to install node typing:

nvm install <version>

For example

nvm install 4.2.1

if you just want to install the latest node version, you can just type

nvm install node

In order to access node and npm as sudo (in order to have <1024 ports) you should run

n=$(which node)
n=${n%/bin/node}
chmod -R 755 $n/bin/* 
sudo cp -r $n/{bin,lib,share} /usr/local