Installing Node.js and npm

Let's get up and running with Node.js and npm.

Installing Node.js

Node.js is the runtime environment for developing server-side Web Applications in JavaScript.

You can test and see if you already have node installed on your machine by opening your terminal and typing:

node -v

Any version higher than v0.10.32 will work, but we strongly recommend that you use v4 (LTS) or v6 (current).

Node.js provides installers for Windows, OS X, and Linux on [http://www.nodejs.org]. However, the best way to install Node.js is to use a version manager:

• For OS X or Linux users, nvm
• For Windows users, nodist

Updating npm

Node comes with npm installed so you should have a version of npm.

This class expects you to be using npm3. To test what version of npm you installed, you can type:

npm -v

It is worth noting that npm gets updated more frequently than Node does, so you'll want to make sure it's the latest version.

npm install npm@latest -g