A while back I wrote a blog post called Upgrade Node.js with NPM.  The shell commands within that post work great but there were reports in the comments that it could mess with node module paths and such — a far from ideal situation.  Little did I know that I was only off by one letter:  nvm is the ideal solution.

Installation

You can read the installation steps on the nvm NPM page.  There are only two easy steps for installation and configuration.

Using nvm

If you work with a lot of different Node.js utilities, you know that sometimes you need to quickly switch to other versions of Node.js without hosing your entire machine.  That’s where you can use nvm to download, install, and use different versions of Node.js:

nvm install 4.0

At any given time you can switch to another with use:

nvm use 0.12

If you want to check out what versions of Node.js are installed on your machine, you can use the ls option:

nvm ls

/*
		v0.10.26
		v0.10.36
->      v0.12.7
		v4.2.1
		system
*/

If you’re done with a version and want it gone, you can do that too:

nvm uninstall 0.10

nvm has been a lifesaver for me, especially when troubleshooting issues in projects where the user may have more than one Node.js version.  If you’re looking to get into Node.js development, one of the first tools you get should be nvm!

Source: David Walsh