How to Manage Multiple Node Versions in MacOS Ventura. (2023 Guide)

Introduction

If you work on multiple Node.js projects, you’ve probably run into this one time or another. You have the latest and greatest version of Node.js installed, and the project you’re about to work on requires an older version. In those situations, the Node Version Manager (nvm) is a great tool to use, allowing you to install multiple versions of Node.js and switch between them as you see fit.

In this tutorial, you will install nvm and learn to install, remove, and switch between different versions of Node.js.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need to have the latest node version installed on your machine, for that you have a few options.

1. Through macOS Installer directly from the nodejs.org website.

2. Through Homebrew as follows.

brew install node

3. Through a CURL as follows.

curl "https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/node-${VERSION:-$(wget -qO- https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/ | sed -nE 's|.*>node-(.*)\.pkg</a>.*|\1|p')}.pkg" > "$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg" && sudo installer -store -pkg "$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg" -target "/"

I hope you were able to successfully install the latest version of the node on your machine. Next, let’s look at how we can install the Node version manager on your machine.

Step 1 — Getting Started

To get started, you will need to install the Node Version Manager, or nvm, on your system. You can install it manually by running the following command:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash

If you prefer wget, you can run this command:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash

Then you will see an output similar to below:

Installing nvm