Ansible Role: Node.js 4.x

Basic role to install Node.js version 4.x on Debian/Ubuntu and do some configuration of npm.

Credits

Substantially based on George Miroshnykov's role: https://github.com/laggyluke/ansible-role-nodejs

Requirements

None.

Usage

Install globally with ansible's ansible-galaxy builtin:

ansible-galaxy install Heroqu.nodejs4x

Alternatively: just git clone the whole repo to roles subdirectory inside your ansible project (my prefered way of doing it).

Example Playbook

- hosts: webserver
    roles:
      - Heroqu.nodejs4x

Role Variables

Available variables and their defaults specified in defaults/main.yml:

Basic NPM configuration

One can specify any number of lines to be applied to ~/.npmrc file:

nodejs4x:
  npmrc_lines:
  - { line: 'prefix=~/.npm-packages', state: 'present', regexp: '^prefix\s*=' }

The default configuration line is pointing NPM prefix to be inside deploy user's home directory. This is to avoid sudo-ing when installing npm packages globally later on. With such a setup all the globally installed npm packages are going to land in ~/.npm-packages directory. No root privileges are to be involved - neither during install nor afterwards - everything can be done under deploy user. And this should be good for security.

Any other options can be added to (or removed from - using state: 'absent') ~/.npmrc file in a similar way.

Deploy user (for npm configuration)

nodejs4x:
  deploy_user: '{{ ansible_ssh_user }}'

It is under this user's home directory that ~/.npmrc file was created just above. The default value is the user under which ansible connects to the host. If you specify another user - make sure it is already there.

On the other hand if you are not adding any lines to ~/.npmrc then this users is not used. All the basic install is done with sudo.

Dependencies

None.

Disclaimer

The role is only tested on Ubuntu/Trusty. Hope it should work with other Debian/Ubuntu distros that are physically visible at Nodesource.com repo directory structure:

  https://deb.nodesource.com/node_4.x/dists/
    - wily/    
    - jessie/  
    - precise/
    - sid/     
    - trusty/  
    - vivid/   
    - wheezy/  

License

BSD

Author Information

This role was created in 2015 by Heroqu. Comments are welcome.