Getting up-to-date NodeJS & NPM

Proven on:

	11 (bullseye)
	20.04.3

NOTE: I take NO responsibility for daily breaking changes in the installation & update procedures from nodesource.com

nodejs & npm versions are problematic.

For some reason, the versions available in all of the repositories tend to be out of date AND all attempts to update them fail in weird & wonderful ways.

Currently, the most up to date version of nodejs is 20.9.0 LTS

(You can verify the current version at the official site)

A WORKING Set of install instructions

(based on this page)

You may need to install curl...

• sudo apt install curl

To get current version(s) on a machine WITHOUT nodejs installed yet:

• curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash -
  • (Yes... Big scary warning...)
• sudo apt install nodejs
• sudo npm install npm@latest -g

& verify that you have the up-to-date versions:

• node -v
  • You should see: v20.5.1
• npm -v
  • You should see: 10.2.3

If the machine already has an outdated version installed

All instructions for updating seem to fail...

But!

Removing the installed version first is an option:

• sudo apt remove npm
• sudo apt remove nodejs

Then go back & start the above installation.

The Old Instructions (Left here for reference...)

NOTE: The Ubunto repositories serve up an outdated version of Node.js. (v10.19.0)

Node-Red 2 requires v12... (and apparently, soon to require newer than that...)

Getting nodejs v12

To determine what version you actually have once it's installed:

• nodejs -v

Anywho...

• sudo apt install nodejs -y
• sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
• sudo apt install npm -y
• sudo npm install npm@latest -g
  • NO! DO NOT UPDATE NPM!
  • (Doesn't actually seem to change anything on Debian... Updates to 8.3.0 on Ubuntu.)