How to install Node.js on WebFaction

Installing Node.js on WebFaction only takes a few minutes and a handful of commands.

1. In the WebFaction control panel, create a new “Custom app listening on port” application. Make a note of the port number it generates. You’ll also need to assign the app to a “website” and associate the website with a domain. For example purposes, let’s call the app “node” and let’s say you pointed it to “node.username.webfactional.com”.

2. SSH into your WebFaction server. Now we need to download the Node source.  First we’ll cd into the node folder that was generated for our app, create a new directory to hold the source files, and then download and extract the tarball.

cd ~/webapps/node
mkdir src
cd src
curl http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz | tar xz --strip-components=1

3. The next few commands will take care of the installation. Note that Node will be installed in your HOME directory and that the Node binary will be located in ~/bin/.

./configure --jobs=1 --prefix=$HOME
make install

4. When installation is complete you can check to make sure that all is well and that Node is on your PATH by typing which node or node -v.

$ which node
~/bin/node

5. At this point Node is ready to go but there are a few other things you should install. Most importantly, the Node package manager npm.

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

With npm installed, you may want to take the opportunity to install some other goodies like CoffeeScript and Forever.

npm install -g coffee-script
npm install -g forever

6. Now we can try running Node. Create an app.js file with the following Hello World code, replacing the port with the port your webapp is listening on. Then run node app.js. If you open “http://node.username.webfactional.com” in your browser you should see the Hello World text.

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/');