Compile node.js on Oracle Linux

On a frequent basis new development techniques are developed, some get adopted and some do not. New programming languages are introduced and some become popular and some die in the first or second stage of their existence. Recently Node.js has been introduced and has seen a rapid acceptance, specially with back-end developers for mobile applications and web-based platforms who do have the need for strong API based solutions.

Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment for server-side and networking applications. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript, and can be run within the Node.js runtime on OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

Node.js provides an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O API that optimizes an application's throughput and scalability. These technologies are commonly used for real-time web applications.

Installing Node.js can be done, for a number of Linux distributions via a package manager. Packages have been provided and installation is a painless task. For other distributions the installation of Node.js is a bit more complex as their is not a mainstream installation package available. For Oracle Linux their is no Node.js mainstream RPM available, this means that you will need to compile Node.js from source to make it available on your Oracle Linux server.

Ensuring you can use Node.js on your Oracle Linux server will take the following steps to complete:

1) Download the sourcecode
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.35/node-v0.10.35.tar.gz

2) extract the downloaded sourcecode
tar zxf node-v0.10.35.tar.gz

3) decend into the new directory
cd node-v0.10.35

4) configure before compiling
./configure

5) make and install node.js
sudo make install

This should give you a fresh compiled version of Node.js on Oracle Linux. You can check if your compilation has succeeded by executing node with the --version option.