How to install Node.js 20 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Less than a week ago, Node.js 20 release. While it’s not the current LTS
release, it will be this coming October 2023.

You’re probably wondering why this post is about Ubuntu 20.04 LTS considering there is a newer LTS release and multiple non-LTS releases that I could be targeting. Kinda just going with what the traffic trends are on my blog. Based on that, it seems like Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is alive and well in the wild.

Not just that, Ubuntu 20.04 is a long-term support release, so it’s going to be
getting some love for a while.

Fortunately though, these instructions can be easily applied to newer versions
of Ubuntu, like 22.04 LTS and the recently released Ubuntu 23.04, as well as
many modern versions of Debian. If you’re distro is based on either of those,
there’s a good chance this will work there too.

All right, so let’s get started! First, I always like to make sure my system is
up to date and that we have curl installed:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt install -y curl

With the system and the necessarily dependencies ready to go, we can grab the setup script for Node.js 20 and give it a spin:

$ curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash -

This script will add the new apt sources and runs another apt update to get
us ready to install nodejs. Installing nodejs takes one more step:

$ sudo apt install -y nodejs

With nodejs installed, you can check to see that everything worked out as we
would have expected, but running the node command with the --version
argument:

$ node --version
v20.0.0

If the version that’s output is v20.something.something, v20.0.0 at the time of this writing, you’re in great shape! If that’s not the case, I’d scroll to
the top and start over as you may have missed a step, or missed an error that
showed up along the way.

Explore More Articles

• Speed up your shell prompt when using Node Version Manager
• How to install Node.js 21 on Ubuntu
• How to install Node.js 18 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• How to install Node.js 16 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Looking for an Ubuntu host?

Check out DigitalOcean, with $200 of free credit to spend over 2 months, you can explore Ubuntu on their Droplets and all of their other managed services!