This took me several hours to figure out so I figured it was worth writing down.
Hopefully this step by step can be used to get node running locally without a lot of problems that are commonly ran into.
Update July 7th 2014 - Updated most of the versions including not pointing to the heartbleed version of OpenSSL
I prefer to get everything needed downloaded before installing. (These are the working versions that I used however the latest "should" work. Python must be 2.x though)
- NodejS - http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.29/node-v0.10.29-x86.msi
- Python - https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.8/python-2.7.8.msi
- Visual Studio Express 2012 - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9816758
- OpenSSL - https://slproweb.com/download/Win32OpenSSL-1_0_1h.exe
- GTK+ - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.24/gtk+-bundle_2.24.10-20120208_win32.zip
- MongoDB - https://fastdl.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-x86_64-2008plus-2.6.3.zip
- Git - http://git-scm.com/download/win
Before starting to install anything I would highly recommend removing any existing Visual C++ packages that have been installed and performing a reboot afterwards.
Install the packages in the following order. Make sure and install in the default paths for everything.
- NodeJS
- Python
- Visual Studio Express 2012
- OpenSSL
- GTK+ - Extrack ZIP to C:\GTK
- MongoDB - Follow the instructions here (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-windows/)
- Git - When installing leave as defaults except allow git to be called from command.exe
- Stick with 32bit NodeJS, Python, MongoDB, OpenSSL, GTK+, etc. There isnt a huge upside to 64bit except for a lot of trouble with compilers and versions of some of these dependencies. I wouldnt imagine anyone is planning to use this stack for anything besides a development instance anyway.
- What caused me the most trouble was getting my path straightened out here is the path I had after everything was completed please not that you will need to subsitute the proper user for the NPM globals path.
%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\;C:\Users\JT4\AppData\Roaming\npm\;C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\
It would be best to just compare this path to what you have and make sure the main elements are there.
Other than that you should now have a full stack capable node dev environment on Windows.
Follow this guide https://gist.github.com/Spudz76/7166291
Without this guide the development environment isnt complete.
I just tested this guide on Windows 8 64-bit and worked like a charm there.