How to permanently update your shell $PATH

In our blog post “How to check the installed version of Node.js”, we covered situations where your CLI could run a command from an unexpected place:

Check where the node command is coming from

$ which node
> /Users/dev/.volta/bin/node

If you’re expecting that path to be somewhere else, it could be due to your PATH, which tells the CLI where to look for commands/executables, and importantly, in what order:

$ echo $PATH
/Users/dev/.volta/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin

To fix this, you need to find the correct configuration file for your shell. You can usually do this (though not always, depending on your developer environment) by combining two values — your $HOME directory, and your current $SHELL:

$ echo $HOME
/Users/dev

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/zsh

In my case, my home directory is /Users/dev, and my shell is /bin/zsh, meaning I’m using Zsh (or Zshell). This means that my Zsh configuration file is likely /Users/dev/.zshrc (rc generally standing for runtime configuration).

Note that in most shells, your $HOME directory is aliased or shortened to the tilde key ~. This means that my home directory can also be referred to /Users/dev or ~.

Here’s a list of filenames you can look for in your home directory — one of them will probably the file you should open:

• ~/.bashrc
• ~/.bash_proflie
• ~/.zshrc
• ~/.zprofile
• ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Find one of these files, and in the editor of your choice, you can customize the $PATH variable. To do this, we’ll re-export (using the export command) the variable, defining a new value. Each path is separated by a colon (:), and at the end, we can append the original $PATH value, so that no information is lost:

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:/Users/dev/.volta/bin:$PATH"

Now, restarting your terminal and checking your $PATH should show an update. If you don’t see any changes, you probably edited the wrong configuration file!

$ echo $PATH
/opt/homebrew/bin:/Users/dev/.volta/bin

In the Node.js example at the beginning of this blog post, following this guide could change the result of which node, as a node executable in /opt/homebrew/bin would get picked up before the node executable in /Users/dev/.volta/bin.