Install Node.js on Ubuntu Server With PPA

Jan 30, 2013 • 1 min read

Here is a quick tip that would have saved me a couple of hours while installing Node.js on Ubuntu Server 12.04. I wanted to install Node from a repository instead of a tarball for convenience but couldn’t figure out why apt-get wasn’t giving Node v0.6.* instaed of v0.8.*. I followed the official tutorial which tells you to do the following:

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

What I did not know, however, was that there already existed a package by the name on nodejs, so by default the last command was installing the more “stable” version. To find out what versions of nodejs are available, you can type the following:

sudo apt-cache show nodejs

To install the latest one, simply append the version to the package name separated by an “=” sign.

# Your version may be different
sudo apt-get install nodejs=0.8.18-1chl1~precise1

I hope this helped you avoid the head smashing frustrations that I went through during this process. Time to hack! :)

P.S. The same thing applies when installing NPM as well.

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