Running a recent version of nodejs on the Raspberry Pi

While attempting to get my checkers network server and the accompanying nodejs-based web application for spectating and playing checkers games running on the Raspberry Pi, I quickly ran into trouble. My Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian, and the nodejs package delivered through APT is ancient 0.6.x.

I developed against nodejs 0.10.25, since that is the latest version of the package for Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the OS I'm running on my laptop. I tried porting the application to the earlier versions, but it quickly turned into a nightmare with library dependencies constantly breaking. I decided it would be better if I could just install the same version of nodejs I developed on.

I found many instructions for how to install nodejs on the Raspberry Pi, but a number of them had you adding third-party APT repositories or grabbing third-party package files. These instructions may, and probably do, work just fine. However, I wanted to skip all the third-parties and get nodejs from the source. Fortunately, this was extremely simple.

Nodejs distributes builds for the Raspberry Pi. Installing the exact version I developed on was as simple as:

	# Fetch the tarball from the nodejs distribution site
	wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.25/node-v0.10.25-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
	# Install the tarball under /usr/local
	cd /usr/local
	tar --strip-components 1 xfz /home/pi/node-v0.10.25-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz

view raw rpi-nodejs-install.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The only difference I found, once installed, is that the node executable is called node and not nodejs. However, the NPM executable is still named npm.