Migrate From nodebrew to nvm

3 min readJul 20, 2020

I have been using nodebrew as the node version manager, however, I recently decided to switch to nvm as it is more popular. This article is a note of what I needed to do.

My Environment

macOS Catalina: Version 10.15.4
Zsh with .zprofile

1. Generate a list of global packages installed via the current version of node

First, as current global npm packages belong to the specific version of node installed via nodebrew, you need to take a note of it so you can re-install everything later on. The following command lets you make a JSON file of the list of your global packages. The right side of > is the destination of the output file. You can change it as you want.

npm list --depth=0 -g > ~/Desktop/global-package-list.json

There might be a better way to create the output file without unnecessary information so you can install the packages easier later. In my case, I only had 16 packages, so this command was good enough.

2. Uninstall node brew

As of now, there is no specific command to uninstall nodebrew. Therefore, we just need to remove the package manually. Usually, nodebrew is installed into your home directory, so the following command should work.

rm -rf ~/.nodebrew

Then, you need to also delete the source line from your profile file. In my case, it is .zprofile . Just delete or comment out the following line.

# Remove the line in your profile file
export PATH=$HOME/.nodebrew/current/bin:$PATH

3. Install nvm

Next, install nvm into your machine. The following command is to install the current latest version of nvm . Go to check the official GitHub repository to know what the latest version is at the time when you are reading this article.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.3/install.sh | bash

Then, you need to add the source line below to the correct profile file. In my case, it was .zprofile . Again, there is a slight chance that the line is different at the time when you are reading this article. In that case, you can always go to check the official documentation.

export NVM_DIR="$([ -z "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-}" ] && printf %s "${HOME}/.nvm" || printf %s "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/nvm")"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm

4. Install some node versions

Now, you should have nvm installed on your computer. It’s about time to install some node versions that you want to have on your machine. You can refer to the following steps to install them. --latest-npm is a handy option to install the latest version of npm along with node .

# List downloadable node versions
nvm ls-remote# Install LTS version with the latest npm
nvm install --lts --latest-npm

# Install latest version with the latest npm
nvm install node --latest-npm

# Install a specific version of node with the latest npm
nvm install v13.14.0 --latest-npm# Set default node version
nvm alias default v14.5.0# Switch node version during the current session
nvm use v13.14.0

5. Install the global packages referring to the output file

Finally, install the packages from the list that you created in Step 1.

npm install list-your-packages-separated-by-space...

That’s everything for this article. Now you can simply enjoy your coding life with nvm.

References

nvm-sh / nvm — Official GitHub Repository:
https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm