How to use Node and NPM without installation or admin rights

There are a lot of blog posts explaining this already, but most of them didn’t work for me. They miss one critical step, in this blog post I am going to provide instructions step by step how to use Node and NPM without installation or admin rights. I am going to provide the instructions for windows; we can follow the same process for other operating systems (macOS, Linux).

Step 1: Get node binary (node.exe) from nodejs.org site

• Go to https://nodejs.org/en/download/ site, then from the downloads table download the  32-bit or 64-bit binary/binaries (not installer files) depending on your operating system.
• Now copy the file node.exe to your favourite location. In my case, I created a folder named nodejs under the Tools folder in the root of my C drive (C:\Tools\nodejs\).

Step 2: Get the NPM

• Go to https://github.com/npm/npm/releases site, then download the latest stable version of NPM. You can find the zip file under downloads section at the bottom of the page.
• Extract the zip file and rename the extracted folder to npm.
• Now go to C:\Tools\nodejs\ (in your case which ever the folder you copied the node.exe file), create a folder called, node_modules then copy the entire folder npm folder from the previous step the node_modules folder.

Step 3: Copy npm.cmd beside the node.exe

• This is the very important step everyone misses, go to C:\Tools\nodejs\node_modules\npm\bin\ folder. Under the bin folder you will find the npm.cmd file.
• Copy the npm.cmd file and place it beside the node.exe from step 1. In my case I am copying the npm.cmd file to C:\Tools\nodejs\ folder.

Step 4: Configure the PATH

• We need add the node.exe and npm.cmd to system path, so that we can access them from any where.
• Now append the path C:\Tools\nodejs; to PATH variable in Environment Variables.
• We can access the Environment Variables dialog, by right clicking on the Computer > Properties > Advanced system settings > Advanced tab > Environment Variables.
• Incase if you don’t have permission to access Environment Variables dialog, simply type the following command in Run dialog rundll32 sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables, this will open the Environment Variables dialog.

Step 5: Verify the nodejs and npm setup

• Go to command line then type node -v then npm -v. These commands should display the currently configured nodejs and npm versions respectively.

We configured the node and npm without installation or admin rights, now you can happily use them.