If you haven’t heard of Node.js, in summary (taken from the node.js website) it is:

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

I wont go into detail here why I am choosing to use Node.js, I’ll cover that on a later post when I start digging into it.

To setup and install Node.js follow the next set of terminal commands.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install nodejs-dev

Simple as that……

Next step lets also install NPM which has some very useful modules for working with Node.js and other packages like Express or Stylus.

sudo apt-get install npm

Finally we can also install a package called NodeMon which will make life easier later on when we are developing with Node.js

sudo apt-get install -g nodemon

Ok everything installed ready to go on our next or first for that matter, Node.js development project.

Please note if you want to check which version of Node.js or NPM you have installed you can use the simple -v command as follows.

node -v
npm -v

This is available to install through the standard package manager or through terminal with the below commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-terminator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install terminator

Step 1

So to get started the first thing we need to do is setup our local server to enable us to carry out local web development. Luckily for us there is a very simple way to do this by installing LAMP with two simple commands.

To install LAMP server open terminal and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel install lamp-server

After the install has completed you should now have a working local server, to test this out head to http://localhost/ and you should see an ‘everything is working’ message.

To get to your root folder for localhost where all your content will be stored, head back to terminal and enter:

cd /var/www

Step 2

Next it will be useful if we install phpmyadmin so you can manage your databases:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

To check everything has install correctly go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and check that you can login.