If you're running a system without prepackaged binary available, which means you're going to install nodejs or io.js from its source code, you need to make sure your system has a c++ compiler. For OS X, Xcode will work, for Debian/Ubuntu based GNU/Linux, the `build-essential` and `libssl-dev` packages work.
**Note:** `nvm` does not support Windows (see [#284](https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/284)). Two alternatives exist, which are neither supported nor developed by us:
**Note:** `nvm` does not support [Fish] either (see [#303](https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/303)). Alternatives exist, which are neither supported nor developed by us:
- [fast-nvm-fish](https://github.com/brigand/fast-nvm-fish) only works with version numbers (not aliases) but doesn't significantly slow your shell startup
- [plugin-nvm](https://github.com/derekstavis/plugin-nvm) plugin for [Oh My Fish](https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish), which makes nvm and its completions available in fish shell
**Note:** We still have some problems with FreeBSD, because there is no official pre-built binary for FreeBSD, and building from source may need [patches](https://www.freshports.org/www/node/files/patch-deps_v8_src_base_platform_platform-posix.cc); see the issue ticket:
**Note:** On OS X, if you do not have Xcode installed and you do not wish to download the ~4.3GB file, you can install the `Command Line Tools`. You can check out this blog post on how to just that:
- [How to Install Command Line Tools in OS X Mavericks & Yosemite (Without Xcode)](http://osxdaily.com/2014/02/12/install-command-line-tools-mac-os-x/)
- When using nvm you do not need `sudo` to globally install a module with `npm -g`, so instead of doing `sudo npm install -g grunt`, do instead `npm install -g grunt`
- If you have an `~/.npmrc` file, make sure it does not contain any `prefix` settings (which is not compatible with nvm)
- You can (but should not?) keep your previous "system" node install, but nvm will only be available to your user account (the one used to install nvm). This might cause version mismatches, as other users will be using `/usr/local/lib/node_modules/*` VS your user account using `~/.nvm/versions/node/vX.X.X/lib/node_modules/*`
Homebrew installation is not supported. If you have issues with homebrew-installed `nvm`, please `brew uninstall` it, and install it using the instructions below, before filing an issue.
**Note:** If you're using `zsh` you can easily install `nvm` as a zsh plugin. Install [`zsh-nvm`](https://github.com/lukechilds/zsh-nvm) and run `nvm upgrade` to upgrade.
**Note:** Git versions before v1.7 may face a problem of cloning nvm source from GitHub via https protocol, and there is also different behavior of git before v1.6, so the minimum required git version is v1.7.0 and we recommend v1.7.9.5 as it's the default version of the widely used Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. If you are interested in the problem we mentioned here, please refer to GitHub's [HTTPS cloning errors](https://help.github.com/articles/https-cloning-errors/) article.
<sub>The script clones the nvm repository to `~/.nvm` and adds the source line to your profile (`~/.bash_profile`, `~/.zshrc`, `~/.profile`, or `~/.bashrc`).</sub>
**Note:** On OS X, if you get `nvm: command not found` after running the install script, your system may not have a [.bash_profile file] where the command is set up. Simply create one with `touch ~/.bash_profile` and run the install script again.
which should output 'nvm' if the installation was successful. Please note that `which nvm` will not work, since `nvm` is a sourced shell function, not an executable binary.
In place of a version pointer like "0.10" or "5.0" or "4.2.1", you can use the following special default aliases with `nvm install`, `nvm use`, `nvm run`, `nvm exec`, `nvm which`, etc:
-`node`: this installs the latest version of [`node`](https://nodejs.org/en/)
-`iojs`: this installs the latest version of [`io.js`](https://iojs.org/en/)
-`stable`: this alias is deprecated, and only truly applies to `node``v0.12` and earlier. Currently, this is an alias for `node`.
-`unstable`: this alias points to `node``v0.11` - the last "unstable" node release, since post-1.0, all node versions are stable. (in semver, versions communicate breakage, not stability).
Node has a [schedule](https://github.com/nodejs/LTS#lts_schedule) for long-term support (LTS) You can reference LTS versions in aliases and `.nvmrc` files with the notation `lts/*` for the latest LTS, and `lts/argon` for LTS releases from the "argon" line, for example. In addition, the following commands support LTS arguments:
Any time your local copy of `nvm` connects to https://nodejs.org, it will re-create the appropriate local aliases for all available LTS lines. These aliases (stored under `$NVM_DIR/alias/lts`), are managed by `nvm`, and you should not modify, remove, or create these files - expect your changes to be undone, and expect meddling with these files to cause bugs that will likely not be supported.
This will first use "nvm version node" to identify the current version you're migrating packages from. Then it resolves the new version to install from the remote server and installs it. Lastly, it runs "nvm reinstall-packages" to reinstall the npm packages from your prior version of Node to the new one.
You can also install and migrate npm packages from specific versions of Node like this:
`nvm use` will not, by default, create a "current" symlink. Set `$NVM_SYMLINK_CURRENT` to "true" to enable this behavior, which is sometimes useful for IDEs. Note that using `nvm` in multiple shell tabs with this environment variable enabled can cause race conditions.
You can use [`avn`](https://github.com/wbyoung/avn) to deeply integrate into your shell and automatically invoke `nvm` when changing directories. `avn` is **not** supported by the `nvm` development team. Please [report issues to the `avn` team](https://github.com/wbyoung/avn/issues/new).
If you prefer a lighter-weight solution, the recipes below have been contributed by `nvm` users. They are **not** supported by the `nvm` development team. We are, however, accepting pull requests for more examples.
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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In order to provide the best performance (and other optimisations), nvm will download and install pre-compiled binaries for Node (and npm) when you run `nvm install X`. The Node project compiles, tests and hosts/provides pre-these compiled binaries which are built for mainstream/traditional Linux distributions (such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat et al).
Alpine Linux, unlike mainstream/traditional Linux distributions, is based on [busybox](https://www.busybox.net/), a very compact (~5MB) Linux distribution. Busybox (and thus Alpine Linux) uses a different C/C++ stack to most mainstream/traditional Linux distributions - [musl](https://www.musl-libc.org/). This makes binary programs built for such mainstream/traditional incompatible with Alpine Linux, thus we cannot simply `nvm install X` on Alpine Linux and expect the downloaded binary to run correctly - you'll likely see "...does not exist" errors if you try that.
If installing nvm on Alpine Linux *is* still what you want or need to do, you should be able to achieve this by running the following from you Alpine Linux shell:
The Node project has some desire but no concrete plans (due to the overheads of building, testing and support) to offer Alpine-compatible binaries.
As a potential alternative, @mhart (a Node contributor) has some [Docker images for Alpine Linux with Node and optionally, npm, pre-installed](https://github.com/mhart/alpine-node).
If you try to install a node version and the installation fails, be sure to delete the node downloads from src (~/.nvm/src/) or you might get an error when trying to reinstall them again or you might get an error like the following:
After the v0.8.6 release of node, nvm tries to install from binary packages. But in some systems, the official binary packages don't work due to incompatibility of shared libs. In such cases, use `-s` option to force install from source:
If setting the `default` alias does not establish the node version in new shells (i.e. `nvm current` yields `system`), ensure that the system's node PATH is set before the `nvm.sh` source line in your shell profile (see [#658](https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/658))
