Improve doc for Mac OS (Ventura) with homebrew

[elmar-hinz]

Summary

In the PATH /opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin: ... /opt/homebrew/bin comes before /usr/local/bin. As long as there are node, npm or npx in the homebrew part, n will not work as expected.

Details

If the user should not fiddle with the path, homebrew has to give up control of node. That in turn means brew install n is a good way to get n installed.

There are other issues. A mere brew uninstall node is not enough. It does not remove npm and npx.

Solution

This did work for me:

# removing bin/npm and bin/npx
npm uninstall -g npm

# removing bin/node
brew uninstall node

# installing n
brew install n

# installing node
sudo n install latest

# some checks
which node
which npm
which npx

[shadowspawn]

There can be problems in general with multiple installs of node to different locations. This comes up with Homebrew on Apple Silicon Macs, but not with Intel Macs.

https://docs.brew.sh/Installation

This script installs Homebrew to its default, supported, best prefix (/usr/local for macOS Intel, /opt/homebrew for Apple Silicon and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew for Linux) ...

Changing the install location takes extra work if you already have some global npm packages installed (like npm itself!), as they will also need uninstalling from the old location and installing in the new location.

[shadowspawn]

In a general sense, the problem here is multiple installs of node/npm/npx. n does warn about a shadowed version of node but not of a shadowed version of npm.

Would it help if n warned about npm being shadowed? (Previously suggested in: #762)

[shadowspawn]

Or are people liking this issue more interested in specific help about transitioning in Homebrew?

(I wonder if the n formula could offer suggestions, but not sure if that is appropriate for formula. I am a light user of Homebrew and do see some tips when installing products.)

[shadowspawn]

Something I have been thinking about is transferring global packages. That just came up in #800.

[shadowspawn]

I opened a PR with a detailed walk-through of switching from Homebrew managed Node.js to n managed Node.js as the example.

See #802

[shadowspawn]

Merged #802 onto master (without doing a release as such).