Troubleshooting installation

If you encounter the following error on linux:

error: could not configure a cxx compiler!

Run:

sudo aptitude install build-essential

To permanently add node to the path in RHEL/Fedora, add it to your .bashrc by running:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/node/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

If you have trouble building with the directions given try this (mac & maybe linux/bsd)

in the root directory of the source code:

./configure  
make  
sudo make install  

configure is currently broken for some versions of MacOS; for more details, see How to compile Node.js v0.4.2 on MacOS 10.5.8. The working approach cited there is as follows:

export PATH=/Developer/usr/bin:$PATH
ISYSROOT="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk"
export LINKFLAGS=$ISYSROOT CXXFLAGS=$ISYSROOT CFLAGS=$ISYSROOT
./configure --prefix=$HOME --without-ssl
make

Something in the libv8 build process seems to fail erratically when using ccache (on OS X with gcc4, anyway), so if you see errors building accessors.o, try removing ccache from your path.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/joyent/node.git returns error: fatal: https://github.com/joyent/node.git/info/refs download error - The requested URL returned error: 403

got this working instead with git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/joyent/node.git