Make sure you take a look at this so that you can install apps via brew cask. Take a look at this to see how they set up their dev computers. My advice for the inital question is to use brew because it will save you a lot of headaches in the long run because it can manage almost everything that you install on your computer. You might also want to run brew update & brew upgrade & brew doctor to make sure everything is up to date. (note: This is what returned when I ran npm list -g) /usr/local/lib If you do have node packages in that folder you would see something like this. To see if you have any packages installed in the local directory can run npm list which will return the following if none are installed /your/current/directory/ If you don't append the -g when you run npm update it will attempt to update the local node packages(aka your current directory $PWD). Knowing that if you wanted to update global packages installed on your system you would run npm update -g To update npm itself you need to run npm update npm -g. You might also look at nvm and envirius Solution 2 However, I do have a project called wallah that can help with this. Installing node is just downloading and extracting a tar archive, so honestly you don't need fancy tools. But for the actual language runtime, the coupling is too tight so I don't use homebrew for that.

Homebrew is great for project-agnostic tools like ag, git, etc, as well as relatively stable other things like postgresql or mysql or mongodb. Given these constraints, I install my interpreters per-project because having stability and decoupling is more important to me than other factors such as reducing disk space requirements. Installing these interpreters system-wide encourages coupling across projects, so I upgrade node because project8 is ready to upgrade and project3 breaks.for example, needs node v0.8.x or v0.10.24.Each project is either moderately or tightly coupled to a particular interpreter version.I have many projects, sometimes dozens and dozens.My situation for application interpreters such as node.js (or python or ruby or etc) is that:

Brew update node