Managing Pre-existing Global NPM Packages After Installing NVM

Today I encountered a problem:

After installing nvm, the path for installing global packages changed,

making it impossible to directly remove previously installed global packages using npm uninstall -g.

How did I discover this?

A long time ago, I installed a global package that could be executed directly from the terminal using a command.

But because it was so long ago,

when I tried to upgrade that package, I found it wasn’t listed in npm list -g.

So, I first used which to find its location,

then discovered it was a symbolic link and used ls -al to see where that link pointed.

I found it was under /usr/lib/node_modules,

which clearly indicated it was installed with npm -g.

Then I carefully re-examined the output of npm list -g,

and found that other global packages were listed under /Users/<USER_NAME>/.nvm/versions/node/v16.5.0/lib.

After some Googling, I found a way to list the global packages installed before nvm using nvm use system && npm ls -g --depth=0.

Tragically, it showed:

System version of node not found.

It seems I had already removed node from the system…

So, I found another command, nvm deactivate, to temporarily disable nvm.

Then, I reinstalled node using brew.

After that, I ran npm list -g again,

and finally saw the package that was installed before nvm!!!

Hooray!!

I could finally successfully remove/upgrade the previously installed global package.

After resolving the issue, to bring nvm back, simply restart the shell with source ~/.zshrc or similar.