nodejs setup on Dreamhost VPS

1) Make a download dir to store the node source and download it.

    mkdir downloads
    cd downloads
    git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
    Find the latest version

2) List all of the tags in the repository, and check out the most recent.
    git tag
    git checkout v0.9.9

3) Make a local bin, configure, compile and install node
    mkdir -p ~/usr/local/bin
    ./configure --prefix=~/usr/local
    make
    make install
    
4) Add new bin to path variable
    export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/usr/local/bin
    echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/usr/local/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
    echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/usr/local/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile

5) Check whether Node is working, and whether it matches your repo checkout
    node --version
    
6) Download and install node's NPM package manager. Use curl's -L option to follow redirects.
    curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh -L | sh

7) Installed correctly?
    npm --version
    
8) Use "forever" to deploy node apps.
    npm install -g forever  
    
9) To start node as a daemon with forever:
    forever start path/to/server.js
    
Forever will keep the node daemon running as long as the server stays up. 
We need one more thing to restart the node daemon if the server is restarted. 
To do this we will add a cron job to start the node daemon after the server is restarted.
    @restart path/to/forever start path/to/server.js

You can get the path to forever by running
    which forever

Where to add the 9th command?

path/to/forever start path/to/server.js caused node to look for package.json in / instead of in /path/to/ which caused an error that stopped the application.
Solved this by using --sourceDir likes so:
/path/to/forever start --sourceDir /path/to/application server.js
Reference: foreversd/forever#270 (comment)