I've been using NVM to install the latest versions of Node.js for my Node.js work. It works totally fine for installing separate versions and switching between them. It also installs the latest version of NPM within each local .../bin folder along with the Node.js binary. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to switch the version of NPM that I'm using (or at least I can't figure it out).
The only solution I can think of myself is to delete the binary that it's defaulting to (which is the NPM that was installed when I first installed node with NVM), and in its place to put the latest NPM binary. However, is there a better way to go about doing this?
As noted in another answer, there is now a command for this:
nvm now has a command to update npm. It's
nvm install-latest-npmornvm install --latest-npm.
nvm install-latest-npm: Attempt to upgrade to the latest working npm on the current Node.js version.
nvm install --latest-npm: After installing, attempt to upgrade to the latest working npm on the given Node.js version.
Below are previous revisions of the correct answer to this question.
For later versions of npm it is much simpler now. Just update the version that nvm installed, which lives in ~/.nvm/versions/node/[your-version]/lib/node_modules/npm.
I installed Node.js 4.2.2, which comes with npm 2.14.7, but I want to use npm 3. So I did:
cd ~/.nvm/versions/node/v4.2.2/lib
npm install npm
Easy!
And yes, this should work for any module, not just npm, that you want to be "global" for a specific version of node.
In a newer version, npm -g is smart and installs modules into the path above instead of the system global path.