 installation to be used without root or sudo rights.

By default, if you install packages globally with npm, npm tries to install them into a system directory (i.e. 

). With the next steps, we're going to use your home directory for those files.

First we create a directory in your home directory where all the npm packages will be installed.

Tell npm where to store the globally installed packages by adding the following line to your 

 variables by adding the following lines to your 

PATH="$HOME/.node/bin:$PATH"
NODE_PATH="$HOME/.node/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"

 variable for npm packages which ship man pages.
Add the following line to your 

 and you should be able to install and use npm packages globally with your user even without root access.

Use npm without root or sudo rights on Linux

One benefit using nvm over a package repository is, that you won't need root access to install Node.js.
This method should probably not be used for your production server, but can be very helpful on your development and testing machines.

$ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.25.1/install.sh | bash

After the install script completed, the script will append its executable path to your 

 (or depending on your shell a different) file. Before you can use 

If you don't want to execute arbitrary shell scripts from the internet you can follow the nvm readme on the Github repository: 

 in your shell and the latest Node.js version will be installed on your system.

The Node Version Manager also enables you to quickly install and switch between different Node.js versions. This allows you to test your applications for older versions of each platform.

$ nvm install v0.10 # to install the latest of the old Node.js 0.10 branch

nvm will automatically switch to the installed version, to switch back to the latest stable version simply type:

To preserve global npm packages when installing a new version of node use the following command:

$ nvm install node --reinstall-packages-from=default