Upgrading node and npm

Personal Log 2020-11-21

This post explains how I upgrade node and npm on my Ubuntu machine. I used these steps to generate a custom script that can replace my existing node/npm installation with the new version.

Get the latest version

1. Visit this website and download the 64-bit linux binaries.
2. Save the compressed package to a known location (for example ~/Documents/computer).

Extract the new package

You can use the file command to verify the file type matches the extension.

🖥️ file node-v14.15.1-linux-x64.tar.xz

📟 node-v14.15.1-linux-x64.tar.xz: XZ compressed data

The tar extract tool can be used to extract .tar.gz and .tar.xz files. The -z flag is only needed for tar files of the gz (gzip) variety. If you try to extract the xz variety with the -z flag, you will get this error message:

🖥️ tar -xzvf node-v14.15.1-linux-x64.tar.xz

📟 gzip: stdin: not in gzip format

📟 tar: Child returned status 1

📟 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Get the new folder name

I searched Stack Overflow for a way to remove the file extension using bash, since the new folder name is the same as the file, minus the extension. In this case, I needed two .* to remove both .xz and .tar.

🖥️ newPackage="node-v14.15.1-linux-x64.tar.xz"

🖥️ newFolder="${newPackage%.*.*}"

🖥️ cd $newFolder

Upgrade the existing files

Since my installation is in the /usr/local directory (which is owned by root), I needed to use sudo to move files to and delete files from this location.

🖥️ installFolder="/usr/local"

Execute using sudo from newFolder (in no particular order):

• Replace the binaries:

🖥️ mv bin/* $installFolder/bin

• Replace the libraries:

🖥️ rm -rf $installFolder/lib/node_modules

🖥️ mv lib/node_modules/ $installFolder/lib

• Replace documentation:

🖥️ rm -rf $installFolder/share/doc/node

🖥️ mv share/doc/node $installFolder/share/doc

• Replace manual:

🖥️ rm -rf $installFolder/share/man/man1

🖥️ mv share/man/man1 $installFolder/share/man

• Replace tapset:

🖥️ mv share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp $installFolder/share/systemtap/tapset

• Replace include directory:

🖥️ rm -rf $installFolder/include/node

🖥️ mv include/node $installFolder/include

Verify installation

Once the files have been transferred, check the remaining content of the extracted folder to verify that no other files are present. Delete the remaining content of the extracted folder, and check the new versions of node and npm are correct:

🖥️ node --version

📟 v14.15.1

🖥️ npm --version

📟 6.14.8