Raspberry Pi and Node.js

09 June 2014

Prerequisites

Raspberry Pi (Model B)
8GB SD card (class 4)
Micro USB cable
USB wall charger with minimum specs of 700mA at 5V.
The basics: monitor, keyboard, mouse, and wired network connection.

Installing Raspberry Pi (NOOBS)

Detailed setup instructions can be found here. SSH is installed by default. After initial setup, Raspberry Pi can be run in a headless configuration.

Download offline or online setup.
Extract and copy files to FAT formatted SD card.
Plug in the SD card into the Raspberry Pi.
Plug in keyboard, mouse, monitor, and network.
Lastly, plug in the power.

OS Installation

The NOOBS installation will have a few choices for OSes to install. This tutorial is based on the Rasbian flavor.

Select the Rasbian OS and select/click Install.
After setup is complete you will configuration (raspi-config).
At minimum change your password and set the date and time.
To run through the configuration again, run sudo raspi-config

After configuration is completed, check for updates.

sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get update

Node.js Installation

At the time of writing, the stable version of Node.js for Raspberry Pi is 0.10.24.

Download and extract Node.js binaries.

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.24/node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
tar -xvzf node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz

Test that node works as expect: node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi/bin/node --version should output v0.10.24
Move installation dir: mv node-v0.10.24-linux-arm-pi /usr/local/bin/node

Edit .bash_profile to add the node installation dir to the environment variables and the node bin folder to the path. Using vi, open the file vi ~/.bash_profile

NODE_JS_HOME=/usr/local/bin/node
PATH=$PATH:$NODE_JS_HOME/bin

Load your saved profile . ~/.bash_profile
Test to make sure settings were loaded: node --version should print the version as expected.

If native binaries need to be built, install node’s native build tool, node-gyp

npm install -g node-gyp