How To Install Node.js 16|14|12|10 on Amazon Linux 2

Node.js is a popular programming language powering many platforms serving millions of customers with billions of transactions per second around the globe. The design of Node.js is influenced by systems like Ruby’s Event Machine and Python’s Twisted. Node.js even takes the event model a bit further by presenting an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library. In this short article we will cover the steps that you’ll need to install Node.js 16,14, 12 and 10 on Amazon Linux 2.

For new users getting started with software development, it is worth noting that Node.js is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime designed for building scalable network applications. It is able to handle many connections concurrently. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node.js will sleep.

Install Node.js 16,14,12,10 on Amazon Linux 2

All major releases of Node.js enter Current release status for six months after which the odd-numbered releases (9, 11, etc.) become unsupported, and even-numbered releases (10, 12, etc.) move to Active LTS status and are ready for general use. For any production use. It is recommended to use the LTS releases which guarantees that critical bugs will be fixed for a total of 30 months.

As of this article writing below are all available releases with current and LTS versions.

In this blog post we will cover installation of Node.js 16,14,12,10 on Amazon Linux. The installation is simplified with the use of a script created by Node.js Development team.

For the installation we’ll be using curl to download the script. If curl is not installed pull it by running the following command.

sudo yum -y install curl

Once curl is installed, run any of the commands below to setup repository for Node.js on Amazon Linux.

### Install Node.js 16 ###
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo bash -

### Install Node.js 14 ###
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo bash -

### Install Node.js 12 ###
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo bash -

### Install Node.js 10 ###
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo bash -

Once it has been executed you can then install Node.js and npm with yum command.

sudo yum install -y nodejs

If you need Node Development tools insntall them by running the following commands in your terminal.

sudo yum -y install gcc-c++ make

To install the Yarn package manager, run:

curl -sL https://dl.yarnpkg.com/rpm/yarn.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/yarn.repo
sudo yum -y install yarn

Confirm Node.js installation on Amazon Linux 2

We need to confirm our installation of Node.js was successful on Amazon Linux 2. The first thing to check is the version.

$ node --version
v14.7.0

Create a test Node Hello World application.

tee hello-world-app.js<<EOF
const http = require('http');

const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 3000;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.statusCode = 200;
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
  res.end('Hello World');
});

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});
EOF

Once the file is created run your web server using the following command:

$ node hello-world-app.js

The service will listen on port 3000

$ ss -tunelp | grep 3000
tcp    LISTEN   0        128             127.0.0.1:3000          0.0.0.0:*       users:(("node",pid=4877,fd=18)) uid:1000 ino:27776 sk:a <->

Visit http://localhost:3000 and you will see a message saying “Hello World”.

Enjoy doing your daily Development projects with Node.js on Amazon Linux. If you’re deploying an application on Production environments you may need to use PM2 Node.js application process management application. To Install PM2 use the command:

npm install pm2 -g