nrollr/Node_AWS_Linux.md

## Node_AWS_Linux.md

      
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              Node_AWS_Linux.md
            
          
    Installing Node.js on Amazon Linux AMI

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

Installing Node.js

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 v4.6.0
npm -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	

Testing Node.js

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)