How do I update npm on Windows?

Question

When I install node 0.10.33 from the msi ( http://nodejs.org/download/ ), I get an old version of npm (1.4.28). How can I upgrade npm on Windows?

npm install

Answer 1

I tried almost every answer but none of them works my way.
Neither npm-windows-upgrade worked nor did the npm install npm@latest etc etc worked.
For people like me I will suggest you guys downloading the latest installer from Node.js website, let the existing version of node directory be on it's place and without changing anything just install the msi installer and you will end up with an upgraded version of node.
My case was upgrading node from 6 to 8.9.3

Answer 2

Use npm-windows-upgrade tool to simply upgrade. Steps are provided in the link.

Answer 3

So none of the previous answers solved the issue for me so I thought I would post my specific solution, which I managed to figure out by going through all the other answers so they were really helpful.

My issue was because I had used chocolatey to install node and possibly npm (looking at chocolatey site now I shouldn't have done that).

To solve the issue I simply had to run the relevant choco uninstall commands for npm and node and then everything switched to the other version of node which I had also installed using the node msi (from node's website).

I hope that helps anyone else that may have gone down the same path as me.

Answer 4

We at Microsoft Open Source wrote a small tool to automate the process outlined above. You can find it here or just install and run it by executing the following in an elevated command prompt / PowerShell:

npm install -g npm-windows-upgrade
npm-windows-upgrade

Answer 5

To upgrade NPM on windows 10

1. Uninstall Node.js
2. Restart your system
3. on command prompt type where npm
4. delete if npm and npm-cache folder exists in AppData/Roaming
5. Install Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/)

Answer 6

all npm install commands were getting stuck and will throw error (behind proxy error) after sometime. setting up proxy was not helping. This is what I did.

Had 8.11 nodeJS

1. Uninstalled NodeJS from Programs & Features with the uninstaller.
2. Reboot (or you probably can get away with killing all node-related processes from Task Manager).
3. Look for these folders and remove them (and their contents) if any still exist. Depending on the version you installed, UAC settings, and CPU architecture, these may or may not exist: • C:\Program Files (x86)\Nodejs • C:\Program Files\Nodejs • C:\Users{User}\AppData\Roaming\npm (or %appdata%\npm) • C:\Users{User}\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache (or %appdata%\npm-cache) • C:\Users{User}.npmrc (and possibly check for that without the . prefix too)
4. Check your %PATH% environment variable to ensure no references to Nodejs or npm exist.
5. If it's still not uninstalled, type where node at the command prompt and you'll see where it resides -- delete that (and probably the parent directory) too.
6. Reboot, for good measure.

Installed 6.11 nodejs then it worked.