The Best Way to Install Node.js, npm and yarn on Mac OSX

Romil Jain
2 min readNov 10, 2017
Node, npm and yarn

The best way to install Node.js on Mac is nvm.

https://github.com/creationix/nvm

You can use the install script for nvm installation.

$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

relaunch your Terminals and check nvm version

$ nvm --version

List your installed node versions if any:

$ nvm list

It is safe if you choose one of the most recent LTS (long time support) versions and install it with the following command:

$ nvm install --lts

Or if you want to install any specific LTS version use below to install that.

$ nvm install <node-version>

So if the latest LTS version of Node is 10.15.3

$ nvm install 10.15.3

Setup this version as the default.

$ nvm use <node-version>

Check your node version with

$ node -v

In case, you want to upgrade node

$ nvm install <node-version> --reinstall-packages-from=<old-node-version>

To Uninstall Node

$ nvm uninstall <node-version>

Switching between various nodes versions

$ nvm use <node-version>
$ nvm use node (switch to latest Node.js version)

NPM

npm is installed as a package with Node

Check the version

$ npm -v

To upgrade npm

$ npm install -g npm@latest

Yarn

To install yarn

$ npm install -g yarn

Check the version

$ yarn -v

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