Most NodeJS Projects will install their dependencies locally using NPM or Yarn, and thus can work with Devbox with minimal additional configuration. Per project packages can be managed via NPM or Yarn.

devbox add nodejs, or in your devbox.json:

  "packages": [
    "nodejs@18"
  ],

This will install NodeJS 18, and comes bundled with npm. You can find other installable versions of NodeJS by running devbox search nodejs. You can also view the available versions on Nixhub

We recommend using Corepack to install and manage your Node Package Manager in Devbox. Corepack comes bundled with all recent Nodejs versions, and you can tell Devbox to automatically configure Corepack using a built-in plugin. When enabled, corepack binaries will be installed in your project's .devbox directory, and automatically added to your path.

To enable Corepack, set DEVBOX_COREPACK_ENABLED to true in your devbox.json:

{
  "packages": ["nodejs@18"],
  "env": {
    "DEVBOX_COREPACK_ENABLED": "true"
  }
}

To disable Corepack, remove the DEVBOX_COREPACK_ENABLED variable from your devbox.json

In some situations, you may want to install packages using npm install --global. This will fail in Devbox since the Nix Store is immutable.

You can instead install these global packages by adding them to the list of packages in your devbox.json. For example: to add yalc and pm2:

{
    "packages": [
        "nodejs@18",
        "nodePackages.yalc@latest",
        "nodePackages.pm2@latest"
    ]
}