Installing Node on a Raspberry PI used to be a whole lot of pain. Compiling an codebase that big on the Pi really taxes the system, plus the usual dependency challenges of native C code. Fortunately, the good chaps at nodejs.org have started automatically building Node for Linux arm Raspberry Pi. This makes life so much easier. Now we can install node in less that five minutes. Here’s how.

First, make sure you have the latest raspbian on your Pi. If you need to update it run.

sudo apt-get upgrade; 
sudo apt-get update;

Node and NPM

Now install Node itself

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.2/node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
tar -xvzf node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi/bin/node --version

You should see:

v0.10.2

Now set the NODE_JS_HOME variable to the directory where you un-tarred Node, and add the bin dir to your PATH using whatever system you prefer (bash profile script, command line vars, etc); In my .bash_profile I have:

NODE_JS_HOME=/home/pi/node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi 
PATH=$PATH:$NODE_JS_HOME/bin

Now you should be able to run node from any directory. NPM, the node package manager, comes bundled with Node now, so you already have it:

npm —version

prints

1.2.15

Native code

If you are just working with pure javascript modules then you are done. If you need to use or develop native modules then you need a compiler and node’s native build tool, node-gyp. The compilers should already be installed with Raspbian. Check using:

gcc —version

Install node-gyp with:

npm install -g node-gyp

Now any native module should be compilable.

That’s it. Node in 5 minutes.