How to Install NVM for Node.js on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

The Node Version Manager allows admins to easily manage node.js versions. It’s a bash script that has the capability to manage multiple active versions of node.js, with functionality such as installation, executing commands with specific node.js versions, setting the PATH variable to use a specific node.js versions, etc.

• These instructions are intended specifically for installing NVM (Node Version Manager) on a single Ubuntu 14.04 LTS node.
• I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server, and I’ll be logged in as root.

As a matter of best practice we’ll update our packages:

apt-get update

The build-essential package should already be installed, however, we’re going still going to include it in our command for installation:

apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev

Use the following curl command to kick-off the install script:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.25.0/install.sh | bash

At the time of publication, NVM v0.25.0 was the most recent version available. You should check the GitHub project page for the latest release of NVM, and adjust the above command to include the newest version. For example, if the most recent version was 0.30.2, then your command would be similar to:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.30.2/install.sh | bash

After running the above command, you may receive output similar to the following:

Close and reopen your terminal to start using nvm

Either do as the output suggests, and close and reopen your terminal session, or run the following command:

source ~/.profile

We can quickly verify that NVM is now installed and working properly with the following command:

nvm --version

Which in this case would yield a result of:

0.25.0

Another very useful command to get you started on node.js management is:

nvm help