Node.js on Raspberry Pi

After all this fiddling with Node.js on my Mac, it’s time to see how it works out on the Raspberry Pi. This is a running summary of how to get a fresh setup with Node.js going.

Linux

I’m using the Raspbian build from Dec 16, called “2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian”. See the download page and directory for the ZIP file I used.

The next step is to get this image onto an SD memory card. I used a 4 GB card, of which over half will be available once everything has been installed. Plenty!

Good instructions for this can be found at elinux.org – in my case the section titled Copying an image to the SD card in Mac OS X (command line). With a minor tweak on Mac OSX 10.8.2, as I had to use the following command in step 10:

sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk1

First boot

Next: insert the SD card and power up the RPi! Luckily, the setup comes with SSH enabled out of the box, so only an Ethernet cable and 5V power with USB-micro plug are needed.

When launched and logged in (user “pi”, password “raspberry” – change it!), it will say:

Please run 'sudo raspi-config'

So I went through all the settings one by one, overclocking set to “medium”, only 16 MB assigned to video, and booting without graphical display. Don’t forget to exit the utility via the “Finish” button, and then restart using:

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Now is a good time to perform all pending updates and clean up:

$ sudo -i
# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get clean
# reboot

The reboot at the end helps make sure that everything really works as expected.

Up and running

That’s it, the system is now ready for use. Some info about my 256 MB RPi:

$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #250 PREEMPT \
                    Thu Oct 18 19:03:02 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux
$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        237868      51784     186084          0       8904      25972
-/+ buffers/cache:      16908     220960
Swap:       102396          0     102396
$ df -H
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs          3.9G  1.6G  2.2G  42% /
/dev/root       3.9G  1.6G  2.2G  42% /
devtmpfs        122M     0  122M   0% /dev
tmpfs            25M  213k   25M   1% /run
tmpfs           5.3M     0  5.3M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            49M     0   49M   0% /run/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1   59M   18M   42M  30% /boot
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor       : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS        : 697.95
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xb76
CPU revision    : 7

Hardware        : BCM2708
Revision        : 0004
Serial          : 00000000596372ab
$

So far, it’s just a standard boilerplate setup. Yawn…

Node.js

On to Node.js! Unfortunately, the build included in Debian/Raspbian is 0.6.19, which is a bit old. I’d rather get started with the 0.8.x series, so here’s how to build it from source.

But first, let’s use this simple trick to get write permission in /usr/local as non-root:

$ sudo usermod -aG staff pi

Note: you have to logout and back in, or reboot, to get the new permissions.

With that out of the way, code can be built and installed as user “pi” – no need for sudo:

$ curl http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.8.16/node-v0.8.16.tar.gz | tar xz 
$ cd node-v0.8.16
$ ./configure
$ make
(... two hours of build output gibberish ...)
$ make install

That’s it. A quick check that everything is in working order:

$ node -v
v0.8.16
$ npm -v
1.1.69
$ which node
/usr/local/bin/node
$ ldd `which node`
  /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libcofi_rpi.so (0x40236000)
  libdl.so.2 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libdl.so.2 (0x40074000)
  librt.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/librt.so.1 (0x40036000)
  libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libstdc++.so.6 (0x40107000)
  libm.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libm.so.6 (0x4023f000)
  libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x4007f000)
  libpthread.so.0 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.so.0 (0x400a7000)
  libc.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6 (0x402b0000)
  /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 (0x400d2000)
$

Oh, one more thing – the RPi doesn’t come with “git” installed, so let’s fix that right now:

$ sudo apt-get install git

There. Now you’re ready to start cookin’ with node and npm on the RPi. Onwards!

PS. If you don’t want to wait two hours, you can download my build, unpack with “tar xfz node-v0.8.16-rpi.tgz”, and do a “cd node-v0.8.16 && make install” to copy the build results into /usr/local/ (probably only works if you have exactly the same Raspbian image).