Installing Node.js and NPM on Windows Subsystem Linux

UPDATE

After having installed everything in this article, WSL Ubuntu was running mad slow. A quick google will show a bunch of people complaining about slow I/O problems with WSL. I have currently switched back to using Cygwin, which has been the best linux-style experience for me in windows for years. I wanted to give WSL a chance, but it sucks to much… – Also, WSL uses the windows CMD style color chooser, which lets you choose the 16 basic linux colors, without letting you choose a separate BG color and FG color separate from the 16 ansi colors. Cygwin lets you customize the colors using a config file “.minttyrc”. – Also #2, WSL Ubuntu was getting VIM’s colors wrong unless I used TMUX, which I am assuming forces xterm-16 or something. – Also #3, Tmux’s border that it draws between panes was being displayed as a bunch of squares (the rectangle character that shows up if a character isn’t supported). This was just way too many problems to deal with, that don’t exist in Cygwin.

Original Post

Today I ran through quite a bit of trouble getting the most current version of nodejs and npm installed in my Ubuntu 16 (on windows 10). It turns out, the normal way of using apt-get to install it, installs a pretty old version. The workaround, I found on a github gist here.

$ touch ~/.bashrc
$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.6/install.sh | bash
// restart bash
$ nvm install node

It’s a simple curl command that will download and run a bash script that will install NVM (Node Version Manager), and then you use NVM to install the latest and greatest node and npm. Here is the actual github page for nvm itself, if you’re curious:
https://github.com/creationix/nvm/blob/master/README.md As of writing this article, this worked for me, and I was able to proceed working on my angular project originally started on my Macbook Pro.