I had multiple folks offering to help, and coworkers as well. Let me just state that as a first time bug-poster on the Node project, I was really impressed by the support I got. So I filed a bug ( 13311) thinking that perhaps it was a simple installer issue. I uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled again and ensured the folder was gone and my recycle bin was empty, and it just didn't work. After installing, my Node was at v8, but my npm was at v4.5.0. To upgrade I decided to take the easy route and just get the installer. So as I said, I spend most of my time in WSL, but I still wanted Node at v8 for my 'main' Windows, ie what I get via cmd.exe and PowerShell. And of course, like nvm it allows you to install other versions as well if you need to switch back and forth. Once n is installed, it's pretty easy to update: sudo n latest. The command he suggested specifically did not work for me because I had Node already installed, but when I went to the project page for n, they suggested simply installing via npm and that worked fine. When I got to my second machine, I came across this good blog post: My Bash on Windows Dev Environment where the author suggested using a tool called n. The first time I ran the install it threw up an error so I did it again because, why not, and it worked.Īll in all this felt like an all around bad idea even though it seemed to work. I then went into that bin folder, ran npm from there, and did: sudo npm uninstall -g npm followed by sudo npm install -g npm. I then tested with node -v and npm -v and while Node worked, npm pooped the bed. I extracted (using tax xf thefile.xz) and then sudo copied the node and npm executable from the extracted file. For my first attempt at upgrading (I've got two Windows machines), I downloaded the Linux Binary (x86/圆4) and copied it into my shell via the Terminal. I'm going to start with the WSL because, as I said, it is my preferred environment. I spend most of my time in WSL and I really recommend it for most devs, but I use the main Windows terminal for Cordova-related testing so I wanted it updated as well. I'm going to divide these tips into two sections, one for the 'main' Windows OS and one for WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I simply want to point out a bug I ran into, how I got around it, and what I used to get me back up and running. Please, please do not take this as the best recommendation. I went through an update yesterday for the release of Node 8 and I thought I'd share what I ran into and how I corrected it. And this has been true for both Windows and OSX. I love Node, but I swear every time I go to update it I end up running into one problem or another.

Update node js windows