Downgrade nodejs when needed using CLI
Need to install, using npm (NodeJS Package Manager), a package, but it requires a lower version of nodejs. How to downgrade nodejs directly without purging all the stuff from the system (Linux)?
To downgrade the nodejs version on a Linux-based system we can use n for node's version management. Here the normal approach we could use with n:
Let's begin determining our Node version:
node -v // or node --version
npm -v // npm version or long npm --version
Ensure that we have n installed on the system:
sudo npm install -g n // -g for global installation
Let's upgrade n to the latest stable version:
sudo n stable
Now let's change to a specific version (we can find the version we want by checking on the official nodejs repository: http://nodejs.org/dist/
sudo n 10.16.0
If we are working on Windows platforms, we can use Cholatey to manage the nodejs package with the following approach also; to handle our node installation we need choco, that is a great CLI for provisioning a ton of popular software on Windows (similar to apt-get or yum for Linux systems).
choco install nodejs --version $VersionNumber
And if we already have it installed via chocolatey we can do the following:
choco uninstall nodejs
choco install nodejs --version $VersionNumber
For example:
choco uninstall nodejs
choco install nodejs --version 12.9.1