Install NodeJS on Ubuntu 22

NodeJS is a popular javascript runtime environment which lets you run javascript code outside a browser. In this article we'll be installing NodeJS 20 on our system which is running Ubuntu 22(jammy).

If you want you can follow the instructions on official nodejs site also: https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/current

You can check our Ubuntu version using either of the following commands:

lsb_release -a

OR

cat /etc/lsb-release

Step 1: Update packages

Run the following two commands to update and upgrade the packages, before we move forward

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

This will ask you for the root password, enter it and let the process complete

Step 2: Install cURL (if not already installed)

We'll be using the curl command to install nodejs, so if it is already present on your system you can skip this step. To check if curl is present on your system run the following command

curl --version

If you see an output like command 'curl' not found, it means you need to install curl. To install curl run the following command

sudo apt install curl

After installation you can verify it by running the previous command again. If successfully installed, you will see a similar output

Step 3: Installing Node

To install node run the following two commands in terminal

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

nvm install 20

Running the above commands installs NodeJS v20 on our system. If you want, you can install any other version of node, you'll just need to specify that version. Say you want to install v18, you'll need to run the command nvm install 18 instead of nvm install 20

If you see a message like nvm not found, close the terminal and open it again. This should fix it.

Step 4: Verify

You can verify the node and npm (node package manager) version by running the following commands:

node -v # should print v20.12.2
npm -v  # should print 10.5.0

I hope this article has helped you and you were able to follow along. If you are facing any trouble, comment down.

Thanks. Peace.