Installation

Building and Installing Node.js

Node has several dependencies. If you are building from source you should only need 2 things:

• python - version 2.5 or higher. The build tools distributed with Node run on python.

• libssl-dev - If you plan to use SSL/TLS encryption in your networking, you'll need this. Libssl is the library used in the openssl tool. On Linux and Unix systems it can usually be installed with your favorite package manager. The lib comes pre- installed on OS X.

Known Issues

If you receive an error during ./configure like this

File "/home/flo/node-v0.6.6/tools/waf-light", line 157, in <module>
     import Scripting
File "/home/flo/node-v0.6.6/tools/wafadmin/Scripting.py", line 146
     except Utils.WafError, e:
                          ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

it is because Python3 is your default Python version. To fix this issue you have to set Python2 temporary as your default Python:

export PYTHON=`which python2`

If you have any further installation problems stop into #node.js on irc.freenode.net and ask questions.

GNU/Linux and other UNIX

Do something like this

tar -zxf node-v0.6.7.tar.gz
cd node-v0.6.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

Or, if you'd like to install from the repository

git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node
git checkout v0.6.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

You may wish to install Node in a custom folder instead of a global directory.

./configure --prefix=/opt/node
make
sudo make install

You may want to put the node executables in your path as well for easier use. Add this line to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshenv

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/node/bin

If you have SpiderMonkey installed, you may have some some conflicting includes. Set CXXFLAGS="-I./deps/v8/src" before building to prioritize the v8 files over SpiderMonkey's.

Windows

You need python and Microsoft Visual Studio but not OpenSSL. In cmd.exe do the following

C:\Users\ryan>tar -zxf node-v0.6.5.tar.gz
C:\Users\ryan>cd node-v0.6.5
C:\Users\ryan\node-v0.6.5>vcbuild.bat release
[Wait 20 minutes]
C:\Users\ryan\node-v0.6.5>Release\node.exe
> process.versions
{ node: '0.6.5',
  v8: '3.6.6.11',
  ares: '1.7.5-DEV',
  uv: '0.6',
  openssl: '0.9.8r' }
>

The executable will be in Release\node.exe.