The following will guide you through the process of installing Node.js on an AWS EC2 instance running Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 - Release Notes
For this process I'll be using a t2.micro EC2 instance running Amazon Linux AMI (ami-d41d58a7). Once the EC2 instance is up-and-running, connect to your server via ssh
- Make sure our server has the latest packages :
sudo yum update -y - Install required packages :
sudo yum install -y gcc gcc-c++ make openssl-devel
For the next steps, use /tmp as the working directory
- Download the Node.js source code, select the recommended LTS version via the Node.js download page and copy the URL of the "Source Code" -package :
curl -O https://nodejs.org/dist/v4.6.0/node-v4.6.0.tar.gz
At this time of writing the current version is v4.6.0 (which includes npm 2.15.9)
- Unpack and cleanup :
tar -xvf node-v4.6.0.tar.gz && rm node-v4.6.0.tar.gz - Configure, make and install,... this may take a while, especially the compiling part.
$ cd node-v4.6.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
You can verify afterwards if the installation was successful by checking the versions of node and npm :
node -v, returns value v4.6.0npm -v, returns value 2.15.9
If by any chance, your are in the root environment and the previous command returns "-bash: node: command not found", you can fix this by creating the following symbolic links :
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/node /usr/lib/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/bin/npm
The best method to test Node.js is actually run an application. This this prurpose we'll configure and runs a simple webserver. Again, let's use /tmp as our working directory..
- Create a subdirectory :
mkdir www - Enter the directory :
cd www - Create a file called server.js and edit the contents of the file :
nano server.js - Paste the following code and save :
var http = require('http');
var server = http.createServer(function (request, response) {
response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});
response.end("<h3>Node webserver running</h3>\n");
});
server.listen(8080);
console.log("Node.js is listening on port 8080");
- Start the application :
node server.js - Open a browser and go to the public IP address of the EC2 instance to test :
http://<ip-address-ec2-instance>:8080 - As a result you should see the "Node webserver running" -message
Make sure the security group applied to your EC2 instance allows inbound traffic to port 8080 !
In an adjacent gist, I'm adding an instance of the Ghost blogging platform - link (coming soon)