Developing NodeJS using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Since I'm using Windows Subsystem for Linux or wsl for short, I find that certain things need to be configured differently. Why, you ask, should I use wsl instead of other tools that are so much simpler to configure on Windows? Because life is about learning to do new things, after you achieve them, it will give you a sense of accomplishment, or so I feel...

My previous article on how to setup and configure wsl on Windows can be find here, if you are curious...

I will add other/link articles to this if I find any other differences using wsl, but for now, I'm only talking about NodeJS.

After I finally setup and configured wsl and hyper, I wanted to share the steps that I used, so I eagerly cloned my repo to the new machine trying to get started, and...issues...

On my previous experience using Windows and NodeJS, I download the package from the official NodeJS site and install, then I'm good to go. But...Since my terminal is on the Linux subsystem, I'm essentially running Node on Linux, so there's a different way to install node:

1. Get the official node setup file

   curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -

   Note the setup_10 here, this means you are downloading the latest node version 10.16.1 (LTS as of the time of this article)

2. Install node using

   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

3. After everything is installed, check your node and npm version by running node --version and npm --version respectively.

You should now have a working Node environment, on your Linux Subsystem. Happy coding!⌨️

Thanks for reading!