Chandrashekhar Tripathi

Chandrashekhar Tripathi

A Full-Stack Developer by ☼ and a learner by ☾

Setting up Node on Linux

When I started learning web dev, I used to open HTML files directly inside chrome. Later, I got to know about "http-server", a simple command-line static HTTP server, which comes as an "npm" package. So in order to install that, I had to install npm first which inturn needs Node.

Prerequisites

  • Familiarity with the linux terminal.
  • Knowing how to install packages from package managers (apt etc)

What you'll need

  • A linux machine (preferrably Ubuntu or an Ubuntu based distro)
  • An active internet connection.

After reading this article, you'll be able to

  • Install NodeJS and npm on your machine.
  • Manage multiple node versions using a version manager.
  • Set up directory for global npm packages.

Introduction

NodeJS is a runtime environment to execute JavaScript code outside the web browser.

Continuing with the earlier discussion, after successfully installing node and npm, I went on to install "http-server" from npm globally only to get this EACCESS error.

npm -g install http-server

In this blog, first I'll install Node and npm system wide. Then I'll tell npm where to install global packages. Next, I will install n to manage multiple versions of node.

Installing Node and npm globally

First update the local package list to see if there's any update available using apt-get

sudo apt-get update

Then install nodejs and npm packages

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

To verify the install, check their versions

node -v
v18.7.0

Configuring global install paths for npm

npm uses the prefix option to set its global install path. I can set this to a directory inside my home. Being inside my home directory, this gets rid of that EACCESS error when installing global packages as I have read/write access to a directory inside my home folder.

First I will cd into my home directory

cd ~

Then create a folder named "global-node-modules"

mkdir global-node-modules

Now to install any global package to this directory, we can use that prefix option like so

npm --prefix=$HOME/.global-node-modules install -g http-server

I can specify this option as default in .npmrc file in my home directory so that I don't need to specify it every time I'm doing npm install -g. My .npmrc file looks like this.

prefix=/home/shyam/.global-node-modules

Now that the prefix is set, I need to include the modules to my PATH so that I can run the globally installed modules from anywhere. For this, add

export PATH="$HOME/.global-node-modules/bin:$PATH"

to the end of your .bashrc, .zshrc or equivalent file. After all, the modules will be located inside the .global-node-modules/bin folder.

`n` - Managing node versions

Installing `n`

Now that npm is available after installing node and npm in the first step, I can install n globally using npm.

npm install -g n

n also like npm tries to install packages to /usr/local by default. This behaviour can be changed by updating the N_PREFIX to a folder inside the home directory.
I can set it to a directory inside home like .n using export N_PREFIX=$HOME/.n. This line also need to be added to the .bashrc or similar configuration file for your shell.

After doing this, I must also add the N_PREFIX/bin folder to PATH to be able to execute the current version of node selected using n.

Thus if you are using bash, the following lines need to be added to .bashrc file

...
export N_PREFIX="$HOME/.n"
export PATH="$PATH:$N_PREFIX/bin"

Using `n`

I can now install the latest and lts version of node using n

n latest
  installing : node-v19.4.0
       mkdir : /home/test/.n/n/versions/node/19.4.0
       fetch : https://nodejs.org/dist/v19.4.0/node-v19.4.0-linux-x64.tar.xz
     copying : node/19.4.0
   installed : v19.4.0 to /home/test/.n/bin/node
      active : v18.7.0 at /usr/bin/node
n lts
  installing : node-v18.13.0
       mkdir : /home/test/.n/n/versions/node/18.13.0
       fetch : https://nodejs.org/dist/v18.13.0/node-v18.13.0-linux-x64.tar.xz
     copying : node/18.13.0
   installed : v18.13.0 to /home/test/.n/bin/node
      active : v18.7.0 at /usr/bin/node

and change the active node version to the latest one by simply executing n and selecting from the list of installed versions


  ο node/18.13.0
    node/19.4.0

Use up/down arrow keys to select a version, return key to install, d to delete, q to quit

At this point, you're all setup for developing node applications and installing npm packages!