Note: if you are using sudo for the install, by default the command you run does not have access to your exported environment variables. You can use sudo -E to pass the existing environment variables.
The nvh command downloads and installs to /usr/local by default, but you may override this location by defining NVH_PREFIX. e.g.
export NVH_PREFIX=$HOME/.nvh
export PATH=$NVH_PREFIX/bin:$PATH
NVH_NODE_MIRROR: overrides default https://nodejs.org/dist/NVH_NODE_DOWNLOAD_MIRROR: overrides default https://nodejs.org/download
If the custom mirror requires basic authentication, you can url-encode the username and password directly in the URL:
export NVH_NODE_MIRROR='https://user:password@host/path'
Note: the username and password will be visible (via ps) to other users on your computer while a download is running.
nvh ls-remote defaults to a showing a maximum of 20 matching versions, but you can change this. e.g.
export NVH_MAX_REMOTE_MATCHES=3
By default the node install also includes npm and npx. You can change this by setting NVH_PRESERVE_NPM to a non-empty string. This has the same affect as specifying --preserve on the command line, and leaves npm and npx out of the install preserving the current versions.
export NVH_PRESERVE_NPM=1
You can be explicit to get the desired behaviour whatever the environment variable:
nvh install --no-preserve latest
nvh install --preserve nightly
See also https_proxy in Proxy Server.
nvh defaults to using xz compressed node tarballs for the download if it is likely tar on the system supports xz decompression. You can override the automatic choice by setting an environment variable to zero or non-zero:
export NVH_USE_XZ=0 # to disable
export NVH_USE_XZ=1 # to enable
You can be explicit to get the desired behaviour whatever the environment variable:
nvh install --use-xz nightly
nvh install --no-use-xz latest