Using nvm to install Node

You can install nvm using the shell script it provides:

$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.2/install.sh | bash
$ source ~/.nvm/nvm.sh

This will clone the nvm repository to ~/.nvm and adds a line to your profile (~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc, ~/.profile, or ~/.bashrc) so that nvm will be loaded when your user logs in.

Now, we can use nvm to install Node. First, let's check the versions of Node that are available using the nvm ls-remote command:

$ nvm ls-remote
        ...
     v0.12.17
     v0.12.18
        ...
       v8.11.3 (LTS: Carbon)
       v8.11.4 (Latest LTS: Carbon)
       ...
       v10.8.0
       v10.9.0

It will come back with a huge list of every Node.js version, and we can install a specific version by running nvm install <version>, where version is the version number (for example, 6.11.1) or the name of the long-term support (LTS) version (for example, lts/boron):

$ nvm install 6.11.1
$ nvm install lts/boron

We want to use the latest LTS version of Node. At the time of writing, that's 8.11.4, so we can run nvm install 8.11.4. Better still, we can use the shorthand nvm install lts/*, which will default to the latest LTS version of Node:

$ nvm install lts/*
Downloading and installing node v8.11.4...
Downloading https://nodejs.org/dist/v8.11.4/node-v8.11.4-linux-x64.tar.xz...
######################################################################### 100.0%
Computing checksum with sha256sum
Checksums matched!
Now using node v8.11.4 (npm v5.6.0)

We can check that Node has been successfully installed by running node -v:

$ node -v
v8.11.4

When we installed Node, we also automatically installed the npm CLI, which is the package manager for Node.js:

$ npm -v
5.5.1