Please note these are how to install the newest pre-release; based on my experience with the current nightly pre-release masters available at http://nativescripts.rocks.
The first thing you MUST do is upgrade your NativeScript Command Line utility, first. The easist way is to do a: npm remove nativescript -g
Yes, we need to de-install the current version; trust me it is easier this way.
Next thing if you are doing anything with Android; you want to do is type "gradle" and see if it runs. If it doesn't run from the command line you need to either install gradle or set your path to use it. If you have Android Studio installed; gradle is including with Android Studio, so you don't have to install it again. For example on my Windows machine; my gradle is located at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-studio\gradle\gradle-2.4\bin. If you are using Ubuntu, the version included is really old and you will need to install a ppa from: https://launchpad.net/~cwchien/+archive/ubuntu/gradle Then you will be able to do a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gradle and get a much more recent version. On a Macintosh, it is recommended you install brew, and then do a brew install gradle. You can alternatively download and install it directly from https://gradle.org/
The next thing you need to make sure is that you have your ANDROID_HOME and JAVA_HOME environmental variables set. If you don't have them set you will get WEIRD unrelated errors when trying to do things with the new version of the NativeScript command line tool.
Then you download the latest master nativescript-cli-master.tgz from nativescript.rocks. Then type: npm install nativescript-cli-master.tgz -g
If everything worked fine; you should be able to do: tns --version and you will see the next version number plus "non-ci".
Now that you have your updated command line; you next want to download your platform(s); tns-android-master.tgz and/or tns-ios-master.tgz. You will next need to do a
tns platform remove android ----- WARNING!!! THIS WILL DELETE EVERYTHING IN YOUR platform/android folder. If you have anything you customized (i.e. like the androidmanifest.xml file); you will want to copy it out first... WARNING!!!!
Then you can run tns platform add android --frameworkPath=tns-android-master.tgz assuming the tns-android-master.tgz file is in the same folder where you are running the tns command. Please note the --frameworkPath is case sensitive; and you need to point it to the entire path wherever the tns-android-master.tgz or tns-ios-master.tgz files are located at. I typically put them in the parent folder that contains all my nativescript project folders, so then I can do tns platform add android --frameworkPath=../tns-android-master.tgz from any of the projects.
The final piece is updating the common core (tns-core-modules-master.tgz). Now in some cases you can skip installing the new CLI & Runtimes and just use the core. I haven't tried to see if the new common core library is compatible with the older runtimes; but I in a lot of cases initially they are compatible, but close to the middle of the development they typically are now relying on a new feature exposed in the the runtimes. So it is always safer to keep the updated together.
In version 1.3 the tns_module folder in the app folder has been depreciated and is no longer used. So you can just delete the app/tns_modules folder. The new location is in the node_modules folder; so you can now do a npm install tns-core-modules-master.tgz
And finally after everything is all done; you do a:
tns prepare android
and/or
tns prepare ios
And you are now running on the latest masters!