For those who have been hiding in the hills for a while; you may not have noticed that the cool news for NativeScript is that we have a new version that has been coming for a while. 6.0 was officially released today!
Well 6.0 has been release; and there are a lot of things to like in 6.0, but if 6.0 doesn't work for your app; you might still need to run 5.4 to get your work done. Unfortunately, the NativeScript team did not listen to my advice and release a 5.5 to continue testing the new webpack only builds, so we now have a 6.0 with still a lot of webpack issues and now no easy work around because legacy mode was removed in 6.0.
One of the techniques, I used while testing 6.0RC on plugins and apps and reporting the massive number of issues I ran into; is making my install side-by-side. So now I have a tns5
command which is my tns 5.4.2 install. And then tns
is my 6.0 release.
![](http://fluentreports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/image-4.png)
The first step to run a side-by-side install is to do a npm i -g nativescript@5.4.2
to install 5.4.2 (the last 5.4 version) on your machine in the global node_modules. Now depending on the OS; this directory will be in a couple places:
The easiest way to find out where it is stored is to run the following command in your command or terminal shell: npm root -g
Under most linux installs this folder is here:
- /usr/local/lib/node_modules
Under Mac OSX the folder can be in a couple places, depending on how you installed it.
For example because I run nvm
on my mac, my folder is located here:
/Users/nathanael/.nvm/versions/node/v10.15.3/lib/node_modules
And on windows 10, it is located typically here:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules
But using the npm root -g
will tell you exactly where it is on your machine.
So first navigate to this folder and find the "nativescript" folder; and then copy it in its entirety to the "nativescript5" folder. This gives you a fully working NS 5.4.2 version in a different folder that won't be overwritten when you do the npm i -g nativescript@latest
which will give you the NS 6.x version.
![](http://fluentreports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/image-1.png)
The final piece of this puzzle is creating the tns5
command, on my mac the folder for where to put it is:
~/.nvm/versions/node/v10.15.3/bin
![](http://fluentreports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/image-2.png)
So I created the tns5
symlink to point to ../lib/node_modules/nativescript5/bin/tns
On Linux we needed to create the symlink in /usr/local/bin; and so I created the tns5
symlink to ../lib/node_modules/nativescript5/bin/tns (the exact same relative path as mac)
Steps:
npm i -g nativescript@5.4.2
npm root -g
- cd (folder listed from npm root -g command)
- copy nativescript to nativescript5
npm i -g nativescript@latest
- create a
tns5
symlink
This should allow you to have a permanent install of v5.4.2 and then your normal update-able version .