Installing Node.js on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS

Nov 02, 2023

Recently I had to reinstall my laptop with Pop!_OS and use Node.js regularly for my website and other applications and installing from the apt repository was not the best option.

First, I tried to install from apt but the Node version was v12.18 and this is an old LTS version from 2019. Not sure why the repository maintainers keep older LTS versions available for users. I saw similar issues with Installing Node.js on Fedora.

Next, I found steps to download the source and build. This was how I went about installing Node initially, but the build took forever. I then saw the built binaries you can download, install, update your PATH, and begin working.

I wrote up a little script that will help assit with this process

# Set Version
VERSION=v20.9.0
DISTRO=linux-x64
INSTALL_FOLDER=/usr/local/lib/nodejs

# Download prebuilt binaries 
curl -O https://nodejs.org/dist/$VERSION/node-$VERSION-$DISTRO.tar.xz

# Create necessary folders, and extract binaries to install folder
sudo mkdir -p $INSTALL_FOLDER
sudo tar -xJvf node-$VERSION-$DISTRO.tar.xz -C $INSTALL_FOLDER

# update profile
FILE=~/.profile
if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
    # Append node path to $PATH in your profile
    echo "export PATH=$INSTALL_FOLDER/node-$VERSION-$DISTRO/bin:$PATH" >> $FILE
    # Reload profile
    . $FILE
    echo 'Updated user profile'
    # Run version reports
    node -v
    npm version
    npx -v
else 
    echo "$FILE does not exist."
    echo "Please manually update your profile to add Node.js to your PATH"
fi

What is nice about this is when there is a new release, we can update the VERSION and run. You might want to double check your profile settings to ensure your path to your node binaries are in the right order in $PATH.

This was geared towards Pop!_OS, but should work similarly for a Ubuntu or Debian based distribution as well.

Resources:

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Installing Node.js on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS

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