Installing Node

Being a node developer, I have installed node on quite a few machines a number of times. I have come up with a "preferred" way of doing it that gets round a few common problems people have with setting up a good environment, so I thought I would share.

Version manager

nave is my version manager of choice. Its a simple bash script and nothing more. Its the most lightweight and the best in my opinion.

Install it (to /usr/local/bin or somewhere else in your $PATH) like this:

sudo sh -c 'curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/isaacs/nave/master/nave.sh > /usr/local/bin/nave && chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/nave'

And then use it like this:

sudo nave usemain stable # downloads the latest stable version
sudo nave usemain latest # downloads the most up to date version
# You can also do version numbers
sudo nave usemain 0.10.40
# And you can run scripts in subshells
nave use 0.12.0 node example.js

Setting up npm correctly

By default, doing npm install -g will write to /usr/local/bin/bin, and you will have to sudo that command every time you run it. Personally I don't like the idea of giving everything I install through npm sudo access on my system by doing this. So I get round this by installing my npm global packages somewhere else.

In your ~/.npmrc, you can do:

prefix = ~/npm-global

Everything you install with npm install -g from then on will no longer require sudo, and the above problem goes away. You will need to make sure that ~/npm-global/bin (or wherever you decide to point it) is in your path.

If you don't do this and you ever need to install a global module that isn't on npm, but is on github and is not public, you will get a permissions error back fomr github because your system will try to use roots ssh keys. Its unlikely you will ever have this problem.

Turn on some logging

In more recent versions of npm, a lot of the logging that you used to get when installing modules has been turned off. I recommend turning it on, partly because it gives the illusion that npm is faster than it actually is, but also if something goes wrong you aren't forced to open or cat the produced npm-debug.log file.

You can turn on info level logging like this in your ~/.npmrc:

logLevel = info

Managing your npmrc's

Where I work we have a few private modules that aren't on the public registry and are on our own private one that is only accessible via our VPN. This means that I need to manually go and change which registry npm is pointing at every time I am not in the office or not on the VPN.

There is a tool called npmrc that gets round this problem. It allows you to keep multiple npmrc files in ~/.npmrcs and switch between them. You can install it with npm like this:

npm install -g npmrc
npmrc # run this to setup the ~/.npmrcs dir

Then you can start creating npmrcs, and running npmrc will display them. The output of that command for me is:

Available npmrcs:

 * clock
   default

And I can switch between them using:

npmrc clock # changes my ~/.npmrc to ~/.npmrcs/clock

I can keep the correct registry configuration in each file and switch between them with ease. It does mean however that you will have to duplicate some settings (like logLevel and prefix) across the different files, but when you have done this once you will never need to touch them again.