Node.js was developed to run JavaScript everywhere (as opposed to solely in a web browser) which led to the development of a lot of software written in JavaScript (arguably the most popular programming language, see the survey by StackOverflow and the RedMonk’s one). I personally use several pieces of it, for instance gtop and decktape and I install them with the dedicated package manager, namely npm.

A few days ago, I had a hard time installing decktape — that I use to convert my HTML presentations to pdf files — on my Debian Buster computer, and so I decided to do a fresh install of Node.js and npm. Fortunately, the topic is well covered online, especially in a very clear article posted on Linuxize which was very helpful. In a nutshell, there are two simple ways for this installation:

1. using the Debian package manager;
2. using NVM (Node Version Manager).

The first option is rather straightforward:

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$ sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

Note that on Debian Buster, you will have the following version installed:

$ npm -v
5.8.0
$ node -v
v10.15.2

The second option requires to run a small command line

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$ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.1/install.sh | bash

which installs Node.js, npm and the following lines to .bashsrc:

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$ export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_com$

As I use zsh, I cut and pasted this to my .zprofile. I read somewhere that it is better to use NVM (cannot find where anymore) but I don’t understand why this would be true except to get the latest version of nodejs and npm. And this is why I decided to use NVM (Node Version Manager). Once installed I checked where were the corresponding binary and the versions:

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$ type node
/home/kevcaz/.nvm/versions/node/v13.0.1/bin/node
$ which npm
/home/kevcaz/.nvm/versions/node/v13.0.1/bin/npm
$ node -v
v13.0.1
$ npm -v
6.12.0

I then installed decktape and gtop:

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$ npm i decktape gtop -g

it worked pretty well! And the commands are also installed in ~/.nvm 💥.

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$ type gtop
gtop is /home/kevcaz/.nvm/versions/node/v13.0.1/bin/gtop

During this process, I figured that I was able to have two versions installed, one installed via apt-get and the other by NVM and so, while I have v13.0.1 installed via NVM, I also had v10.13.0.

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$ whereis node
node: /usr/bin/node /usr/include/node /home/kevcaz/.nvm/versions/nv13.0.1/bin/node /usr/share/man/man1/node.1.gz

Seemed like this was not a problem but I thought the sane piece of software installed twice at different locations with different versions wasn’t the best thing to do and so I removed v10.13.0. I may change this in the future if I use nodejs for other Debian packages, in which case I will write a follow up to this note 😄!