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Notes on Node.js

Installing on Ubuntu/Debian

As of March 2021, the official apt package for Ubuntu 20.4 was way out of date. This article discusses several options for installing it:

I used option 3, installing NVM to manage multiple versions of Node.js, since I anticipate working on multiple projects from various sources that are not all on the same version. Specifically, since nvm is a shell script available as a GitHub project, I included it as a submodule in my dotfiles project. This makes NVM readily available to me in all my development environments.

Once you have NVM, you can investigate available versions of Node.js using the ls-remote and version-remote commands. E.g. to see the latest long-term support version:

nvm version-remote --lts

or to see all LTS versions:

nvm ls-remote --lts

See nvm's help for more. Installing multiple versions, and choosing the active version, are all easy. Works on Windows in Git Bash, although you may need to enable Symbolic links on Windows.