Can't use NVM from root (or sudo)

Vitalii Korsakov picture Vitalii Korsakov · Jan 19, 2014 · Viewed 70.3k times · Source

I've mentioned that my application uses different version of NodeJS when running from sudo.

$ node -v
v0.10.23
$ sudo node -v
v0.11.8-pre

This v0.11.8-pre caused me some problems, so I definitely don't want to use it, but I can't change it for root.

$ sudo nvm use v0.10.23
sudo: nvm: command not found

I've tried to install nvm from root user, but got error "NVM already installed", but still nvm not found when running from sudo. What is my problem?

Answer

Venkat Selvan picture Venkat Selvan · Apr 27, 2015

The below list of commands (source: digitalocean) seems to fix the problem

n=$(which node); \
n=${n%/bin/node}; \
chmod -R 755 $n/bin/*; \
sudo cp -r $n/{bin,lib,share} /usr/local

The above command is a bit complicated, but all it's doing is copying whatever version of node you have active via nvm into the /usr/local/ directory (where user installed global files should live on a linux VPS) and setting the permissions so that all users can access them.

Hope this helps!