Node.js + NPM

Instructions for installing Node.js and its requirements on:

• Mac OS X
• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) family: Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora. Amazon’s standard Linux AMI is part of this family.
• Arch Linux

(Click any item to jump to that section of this tutorial.)

Mac OS X

Prerequisite package manager

Get Homebrew (GitHub repo). You should have this already, if you’re on a Mac.

# OS X is most commonly a single-user workstation, so keep it simple:
sudo chown -R $(id -un):staff /usr/local
# Single line install from brew.sh website (installs in `/usr/local`)
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Troubleshooting: if that doesn’t work, see the Homebrew wiki’s Installation page.

Using Homebrew

# Update homebrew if you already have it:
brew update
# Homebrew install Node.js and NPM together
brew install node

Red Hat

Enable “EPEL” (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux):

# Edit the secondary repos...
#   change the `enabled=0` line in the first block to `enabled=1`
sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

On my AMI, it now looks something like this:

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

Use yum to install Node.js via package manager from the EPEL repository:

sudo yum install -y nodejs npm

Arch Linux

Update your Pacman repository information first, just in case:

sudo pacman -Sy

Use Pacman to install Node.js via package manager:

sudo pacman -S nodejs

This installs the node binary to /usr/bin/node, unfortunately, which means you’ll need to sudo npm install -g ... all your global packages down the line, but it’s easier than installing from source. And npm’s attitude toward localizing packages makes it a good deal less painful than, say, Python’s site-packages.