My procedure for installing node.js on ubuntu server.

node-on-ubuntu-with-git.sh

# Prerequisites:
sudo apt-get install g++ make libssl-dev git-core pkg-config

# pkg-config: is needed so that configure will be able to verify that openssl is 
#     installed.
# curl: is handy, but not needed for node.js to work.

# Install into user-specific local bin:
mkdir ~/local
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
. ~/.bashrc

# Download Source for Node
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node.git


# Install Node:
cd ~/src/node

git checkout v6.3.0 #or latest stable version
./configure --prefix=~/local
make install

I frequently setup VMs for development, and like to have node installed for tooling, if nothing else. This gist is just a reminder of what I do to get node up and running. It's based on Isaacs' original gist, with some tweaks and additions to work on Ubuntu.

Discovered a couple of other "bugs" in the script after installing node as the very first thing on Ubuntu 12.04 server.

1. make, pkg-config were not installed by default, so they were added.
2. Added a note to checkout the latest stable version, and not just what's in the repo at the time of the pull (which isn't always stable).