Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment. It revolutionized the JavaScript world and made JavaScript the most popular development language among developers today (according to https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-programming-languages). The Node ecosystem is the largest in the world with over 600,000 packages and is managed by NPM, the default package manager.
The JHipster CLI is a NodeJS application and hence requires NodeJS, to run, and many of the tools used in the generated application will also require NodeJS:
- Check for NodeJS by typing node -v in the Terminal. It should display a version number. Make sure that the version number is greater than 8.9 and corresponds to the latest LTS version of NodeJS.
- If the command is not found or if you have a lower version of NodeJS then you can visit the Node.js website (https://nodejs.org/en/download/) and follow the instructions to install the latest LTS version available. Please note that non-LTS versions (current) might not be stable and it is advised not to use them.
- Once installed, check the command in step 1 again to make sure. As NodeJS alters the environment variables, you would have to open a new Terminal here.
- NPM is automatically installed when you install NodeJS. You can check this by running npm -v in the Terminal.
You can install multiple NPM packages by running the command npm -g install bower gulp-cli CLI or using Yarn, yarn global add bower gulp-cli.