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Install NVM, NodeJS, Yarn via Homebrew on M1 (Apple Silicon) MacBook

Added on 29/03/2021

:rocket:  Motivation: I have read through numerous blogs to get the setup right and lost a respectable amount of time while doing so. My sole intention is to save you some time while setting up your Apple Silicon MacBook!

:warning:  Before we start:

  • This guide assumes that you haven't installed any of them before or properly removed them.
  • The new macOS Big Sur comes with zsh as a default shell so we don’t need to install it separately anymore.
  • Starting from version 2.7.1, Homebrew has a native support for Apple Silicon.

Step1: Install Homebrew

Paste the below shell command in a macOS terminal to install Homebrew. Note: The installation directory is /opt/homebrewfor Apple Silicon.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

At the end of your installation, you may see the following message (or similar):

==> Next steps:
- Add Homebrew to your PATH in /Users/homefolder/.zprofile:
    echo 'eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)' >> /Users/<your home folder>/.zprofile
    eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)
- Run `brew help` to get started

If this is the case, go ahead and add eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv) to your profile. If you don't have the .zprofile file, you can create it with touch:

touch .zprofile

For more information about profiles see here.

After you add the line in your profile, verify the Homebrew installation:

brew -v

Step2: Install NVM

brew install nvm

Also, add following to your profile. (.profile or .zshrc or .zprofile)

# NVM
export NVM_DIR=~/.nvm
source $(brew --prefix nvm)/nvm.sh

Restart your terminal and verify that nvm is properly installed by observing the version:

nvm -v

Step3: Install NodeJS

nvm install --lts=Fermium

This command will install the latest stable version of the node. If you also need older versions, nvm install <older version> command will not work. To overcome this, we need to switch to x86 build and install older versions using Rosetta 2 shell. Before we switch, type arch in your terminal to confirm that your terminal is in arm64 mode. To perform the switch:

arch -x86_64 zsh

Verify the mode by typing arch. It should return i386

At this point, install all the node versions that you need. For example:

nvm install v10.21.0

Restart your terminal to carry on using the native arm64 mode.

We have now installed two versions of the node via nvm. You can verify this by typing nvm list. If you need to change the default version, type nvm use v10.21.0. However, if you restart your terminal or open a new tab, the latest version of the node will become the default again. To make your selection persistent, you should use nvm alias default 10.21.0. Here you can find further explanations around this.

Note: Another method would be duplicating the terminal and forcing the duplicated one to always run with Rosetta 2. If you are interested, please read here and there.

Step4: Install Yarn and link nvm node folder to Homebrew

brew install yarn

brew uninstall node --ignore-dependencies

Next, create a symbol link to node folder from nvm for yarn in Homebrew.

Note: Below command will link a node folder to the /opt/homebrew/Cellar from ~/.nvm/versions directory. If you already have a node folder at the destination, the link attempt will fail.

ln -s ~/.nvm/versions/node/ /opt/homebrew/Cellar

Step5: If you need to add/remove NodeJS versions in the future or upgrade Yarn

First we need to remove the symbol link that we have created earlier:

rm -rf /opt/homebrew/Cellar/node

If we need to upgrade yarn:

brew upgrade yarn

Visit Step 3 to add/remove another version of the node, and then visit Step 4 to re-establish the link.

DONE!

Credits: I took a lot of references from install_nodejs_and_yarn_homebrew repo of nijicha in this post. Hence, I would like to thank the author for helping me to set up my machine as well as making this post possible.

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