1. Building and Installing Node.js

Step 1 - Pick Your Platform

Node should install out of the box on Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris.

With some effort you should be able to get it running on other Unix platforms and Windows (either via Cygwin or MinGW).

Step 2 - Prerequisites

Node has several dependencies, but fortunately most of them are distributed along with it. If you are building from source you should only need 2 things.

python - version 2.4 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.

Step 3a - Installing on Unix (including BSD and Mac)

Building from source

Use make to build and install Node (execute the following on the command line)

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node
export JOBS=2 # optional, sets number of parallel commands.
mkdir ~/local
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/node
make
make install
export PATH=$HOME/local/node/bin:$PATH

If you have any installation problems, look at Troubleshooting Installation, try an alternate installation method, or stop into #node.js and ask questions.

Pre-built binaries

You can also install node from packages: Installing Node.js via package manager

Step 3b - Building on Windows

Pre-built binaries

Self-contained binaries are available at node-js.prcn.co.cc

Building from source

There are two ways of building Node on Windows. One is over the Cygwin emulation layer the other is using MinGW (GNU toolchain for windows). See the Cygwin and MinGW pages.

Neither builds are satisfactorily stable but it is possible to get something running.

Step 4 - Install NPM

NPM is a package manager that has become the de-facto standard for installing additional node libraries and programs. Here's the quick and easy one-liner for installing on Unix.

# curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

To install a library e.g. Express:

# npm install express

And visit https://github.com/isaacs/npm for details.

2. How to run Node.js

An example of a web server written in Node which responds with "Hello World" for every request.

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');

To run the server, put the code into a file helloworld.js and execute it with the node program:

node helloworld.js

Then request http://127.0.0.1:1337 in browser, the page will show Hello World