nvm is a tool for managing multiple versions of node and npm.

It's a utility that manipulates your PATH to include the desired version of node. Other solutions require parsing env's output and do other slow things. Before this, there was an extra second or two added to my shell startup time. With about 10 versions of node installed this script takes 50ms to run.

You can get even better performance, with a solution that works in fish/bash/zsh by using fnm.

nvm install 5
nvm use 5 # or e.g. 5.8 or 5.8.1

Requirements: you must have Fish 2.6.0 or newer.

First install nvm if you haven't already. You can check the nvm readme for a more up to data install command.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.11/install.sh | bash

Then install fast-nvm-fish:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brigand/fast-nvm-fish/master/nvm.fish > ~/.config/fish/functions/nvm.fish

Or using fisher:

fisher add brigand/fast-nvm-fish

The fish_user_paths universal variable must exist before running nvm commands. Run this once in your fish shell:

set -U fish_user_paths

To make it work on new shells you'll need to set a version in config.fish.

echo 'nvm use 7.2.1' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

If you have nvm installed anywhere other than ~/.nvm, set a global variable in your config.fish file before first invoking nvm use.

set -gx NVM_DIR ~/custom_path/nvm
nvm use 7.2.1