There are, however, a few alternatives created mimic the functionality of NVM: nvmw and nvm-windows. This means it isn't natively compatible with Windows, unfortunately. Since it is written as a bash script, it's only available for OSX and Linux. NVM is basically just a few bash scripts that help you install, uninstall, and link different Node binaries. So if you're maintaining a library you created you can easily go back to any version of Node and test it out or create a patch. With NVM, there is no need to manually install and uninstall versions like you used to.Īlso, every time you install a new Node.js version, you also get the corresponding npm package with it, so there's no need to worry about compatibility there.Įach version you install remains on the system and can be accessed at any time. Node Version Manager (NVM) is a utility to help you quickly install and switch between Node versions. So if you were doing any development with io.js or v1.0.x+ versions then you'd have to switch back and forth between Node/io.js versions to use Ghost.īetween the fast-paced releases and having to support multiple versions of Node, there's got to be an easier way to switch between versions. This became a big problem for developers needing to support multiple versions of Node for their libraries and for users who had to switch between versions for different software.įor example, the popular blogging platform Ghost only supported v0.10.0 and v0.12.0 for a long time. Installing Node isn't the easiest process, or at least it isn't convenient to constantly be uninstalling and reinstalling it every few days. A big part of this jump was the merging of io.js in to Node, which was under much more rapid development.

There were 35+ releases in that time period, with each one adding some significant functionality or bugs fixes.

Within the past 6 months alone, Node.js has gone from v0.12.x to v5.1.x.

Windows nvm