Install Node Version Manager (NVM) without Admin Rights

Emanuele Bartolesi - Jun 2 '22 - - Dev Community

NVM (Node Version Manager) is the best way to run multiple versions of NodeJS on the same machine.
It's not only for Windows but in this post I will talk about my experience to install NVM on a Windows machine without Admin Rights.
Why? Because at work I have a very restricted access to the operative system and on what can I do on my PC.

Download NVM for Windows

NVM for Windows is an opensource project mantained by the community to install and manage multiple versions of NodeJS on Windows.
You can find the latest releases at this link.
At the moment, the latest version is 1.1.9.
For this special case you can download the file nvm-noinstall.zip.
Extract the zip file into your favorite folder for this kind of tool.
On my machine I have a main folder called "tools" on my root with other tools as well, like ngrok or screentogif.
For instance, you can extract the files into the folder c:\tools\nvm.

Add the environment variables

From the System Properties of your machine, click on the button "Environment Variables".

Environment Variables

Add two environment variables, the first one, called NVM_HOME and this is the patch of NVM. In our case is c:\tools\nvm.
The other variable is called NVM_SYMLINK and it must be a directory should not exists, like c:\tools\nvm\nodejs.

Environment Variables

Image description

Now you can update the Patch value with the two new values: %NVM_HOME%;%NVM_SYMLINK%

Path values

If you want you can create a file called "settings.txt" in the nvm directory and it uses that file like User Environment Variables.
It prevents to restart the machine but it's not mandatory.
The example below is the content of my settings.txt file.
As you can see contains the same parameters values of the environment variables.

root: C:\tools\nvm 
path: C:\tools\nvm\nodejs
arch: 64 
proxy: none
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Launch NVM

Now you are ready to launch and use NVM on your machine.
Open your favorite terminal application and type "nvm".
If everything is configured well, you should see a screen like this one below.

nvm up & running

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Terabox Video Player