How to Install Node and NPM on a PC
In this lesson we're going to walk through what we need to do to install node and npm on a Windows machine once we have these two items installed then we're going to be able to start building out react applications.
Guide Tasks
  • Read Tutorial
  • Watch Guide Video
Video locked
This video is viewable to users with a Bottega Bootcamp license

So to start off go to nodejs.org and you should see buttons just like we have right here.

large

Now, whenever you're going through the course these numbers might be slightly different and if you're wondering what the difference is you can see on the left-hand side. Here we have 8.9.4 LTS and 9.4.0 Current.

So whenever you see a situation like this LTS stands for the latest stable release and current is literally the latest release. And typically you want to go with the latest stable version and the reason for that is because even though 9.4.0 might have a few new features it most likely is not going to play as nicely with some of the other code libraries and dependencies and you may spend a lot of time fixing configuration bugs which is never fun.

So in order to get started you simply have to come here click the download button and then it's going to start downloading this to your system. It's a 16 megabyte file. And so let that download. And then once it's done and it looks like it's done right here you can simply click on it and then you can start opening it up and it looks like it's still is finishing off a little bit. So I'm going. It says open when done.

And here we go. So this popped up after a few clicks.

large

Now if I press next accept the terms you can just have this installed right here in your program files. Hit next again we want everything here so we don't want to change anything. Hit next and click install. Now this may or may not have a window come up and ask for your system password or something like that which it just did for me just click yes and it's going to go run the installer and after it's done then we'll be able to test it out to make sure that it is working.

OKay looks like we are all ready to go it completed successfully.

large

And I've clicked finish.

Now to test this out, you can open up either a command promp or the power shell depending on what you have on your system. So you can go down in the very bottom left-hand side of the screen and just type cmd or a power shell and they'll bring it up. I'm going to do that it's kind of hidden with where the screen is. But here you can see that I have Windows power shell open.

Now if this worked I should be able to type in node -v and it looks like it worked perfect. You can see we now have version 8.9.4 on the system and now we also need to make sure that npm was installed. And so this is our package manager so this is what's going to allow us to bring down all of our dependencies and our outside code libraries so I'm going to say npm -v and it looks like that work too version 5.6.

large

So with all of that in place we are ready to start building out react applications.

Resources