A common way to work with Vue CLI 3 is via a command-line app called the Command-Line Interface (CLI), where we run our Vue CLI 3 commands. Another prerequisite is to have Node.js installed on our machine.

If you are working on a shared computer, say, within a team of your fellow developers, the chances are that you already have all the prerequisites. In that case, you could just verify that you can start using Vue CLI 3 right away by running a couple of checks.

To quickly check whether you can run Vue CLI 3 right now and skip all the installation steps, run the following command in your command-line app:

node --version

Also, check for Vue CLI 3 with this command:

vue -V

If you get back any version of Node above 8.9 (ideally, above 8.11.0), you're good to go. Obviously, for Vue CLI, you'd want any version above 3.0.0.

Additionally, if you have a version of Vue CLI lower than V3, or you'd like to update to the newest Vue CLI, such as 3.3.0, just run this command:

npm install @vue/cli

What if you don't have Node.js or Vue CLI installed?

We'll use nvm or nvm-windows for Node, and after that, we'll install Vue CLI 3.

What is the recommended version of Node.js we should be using? This information is available at the following link: https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/installation.html.

Currently, as of early 2019, to get the best results with Vue CLI, the minimum version of Node required is 8.11.0+, but you can kind of get by with 8.9 if you really have to.

This brings us to another important decision: the installation of NVM.

While it is not absolutely necessary to install NVM in order to run Vue CLI 3 on your system, installing NVM is desirable for a couple of reasons.

First, you never know when Node will get a recommended update with security fixes, which usually means you'd be better off installing the update on your machine.

Second, if you need to run a different technology, other than Vue, this other technology might also require a different version of Node. To easily switch between these required Node installations on your system, you can simply install NVM.

You can download the NVM for Windows from this address:

https://github.com/coreybutler/nvm-windows/releases

Locate the nvm-setup.zip file, download and extract nvm-setup.exe from it, and then install it by following these installation steps:

1. Open the Run prompt by pressing Windows + R. Type cmd into the prompt.
2. While inside the prompt, press Ctrl + Shift + Enter. This will run Command Prompt with administrator privileges, which is required for the next step.
3. Visit https://nodejs.org, and see the current Long-term Support (LTS) version number. For example, currently, on 64-bit Windows, the LTS version is 10.15.1.
4. To install it, run the following command in Command Prompt with administrator privileges:

nvm install 10.15.1

5. Command Prompt will log out the following message:

Downloading node.js version 10.15.1 (64-bit) ...

6. Once the download is finished, we can use the downloaded version of Node. We do it with the following command:

nvm use 10.15.1

7. Finally, you can verify whether the installation was successful by running the following command:

node --version

8. If you're curious about the version of npm that came with your Node installation, simply run the following:

npm --version

Next, we'll install Vue CLI 3.