Raspberrypi Installing Node

To install node in the raspberry pi, you can use the deb packages distributed by the node-arm app, which is an open source express app hosted on heroku. Source code available on github.

At the time of writing this, there were four build available:

I will go with the latest stable release:

$ wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_0.10.36-1_armhf.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i node_0.10.36-1_armhf.deb

NOTE: You can access the latest release available from this url:

http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb

Also if you need to remove an old version of node that you installed using apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove nodejs

To test this out:

var http = require('http');

// Simple HTTP server handling index route with a hello world!
var server = http.createServer(function (request, response) {
    response.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" });
    response.end("Hello World!!");
});

// Listen on port 8000
server.listen(8080);

console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080");

Now, if you issue the ifconfig command, you can get your raspberry pi IP on the network- assuming it is connected to your LAN:

$ ifconfig

Which should give you a bunch of the following. The field you are looking for is the inet addr:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr b8:27:eb:81:56:02  
          inet addr:192.168.1.132  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:14968 errors:0 dropped:1 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:9838 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:16426937 (15.6 MiB)  TX bytes:996586 (973.2 KiB)

In my case the IP is 192.168.1.132, so from browser in my computer I can access the raspberry pi server typing this address http://192.168.1.132:8080

NOTE: If you want to use native extensions then you should install gyp:

$ npm install -g node-gyp

If the install fails because of not running the command as root, you can try to follow this instructions here.

sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP ~/.npm
sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP /usr/local/lib/node_modules
sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local