Installing latest nodejs on Linux

Introduction:

According to its site, Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Basically, it is a server side software system that can be used to design and write scalable Internet applications. It can be used to create a web server on its own, thus removing the need of using a web server software like Apache. Due to the asynchronous I/O mode, there is minimum overhead(computation time).

I have a machine running Ubuntu 12.10, so I normally use my package manager (apt-get) to install applications which are present in the repository. However, even though I did apt-get multiple times, the installed version seemed to an outdated v0.6.* where-as, the latest version as per their site was v0.10.4 (Huhhh!!!)

Detailed Steps:

Below are the steps which I had to perform, to get the latest nodejs up and running:

Step 1: We will start off, by installing the "software-properties-common" package for the "apt-get" repository. This can be done using the command:
"sudo apt-get install software-properties-common"

Step 2: Chris Lea's repository includes the latest npm and nodejs-dev that is required to install nodejs v0.10.4
Below command helps you add thoseto your local repository list:
"sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js"

Step 3: Update the local package index with the changes made in the repository using the command:
"sudo apt-get update"

Step 4: Now, install nodejs as you normally would, using apt-get command as shown below:
"sudo apt-get install nodejs"

You can run #nodejs --version on terminal to see the version of the currently installed nodejs.




Above screenshot shows that we have updated nodejs to the latest available version: v0.10.4

References:

• https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager