How to yum install Node.JS on Amazon Linux

Like others, the accepted answer also gave me an outdated version.

Here is another way to do it that works very well:

$ curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | bash -
$ yum -y install nodejs

You can also replace the 16.x with another version, such as 18.x, 14.x, etc.

You can see all available versions on the NodeSource Github page, and pull from there as well if desired.

Note: you may need to run using sudo depending on your environment.

Stumbled onto this, was strangely hard to find again later. Putting here for posterity:

sudo yum install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel

EDIT 3: As of July 2016, EDIT 1 no longer works for nodejs 4 (and EDIT 2 neither). This answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/35165401/78935) gives a true one-liner.

EDIT 1: If you're looking for nodejs 4, please try the EPEL testing repo:

sudo yum install nodejs --enablerepo=epel-testing

EDIT 2: To upgrade from nodejs 0.12 installed through the EPEL repo using the command above, to nodejs 4 from the EPEL testing repo, please follow these steps:

sudo yum rm nodejs
sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/node
sudo yum install nodejs --enablerepo=epel-testing

The newer packages put the node binaries in /usr/bin, instead of /usr/local/bin.

And some background:

The option --enablerepo=epel causes yum to search for the packages in the EPEL repository.

EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is open source and free community based repository project from Fedora team which provides 100% high quality add-on software packages for Linux distribution including RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), CentOS, and Scientific Linux. Epel project is not a part of RHEL/Cent OS but it is designed for major Linux distributions by providing lots of open source packages like networking, sys admin, programming, monitoring and so on. Most of the epel packages are maintained by Fedora repo.

Via http://www.tecmint.com/how-to-enable-epel-repository-for-rhel-centos-6-5/

The accepted answer gave me node 0.10.36 and npm 1.3.6 which are very out of date. I grabbed the latest linux-x64 tarball from the nodejs downloads page and it wasn't too difficult to install: https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/.

# start in a directory where you like to install things for the current user
(For noobs : it downloads node package as node.tgz file in your directlry)
curl (paste the link to the one you want from the downloads page) >node.tgz

Now upzip the tar you just downloaded -

tar xzf node.tgz

Run this command and then also add it to your .bashrc:

export PATH="$PATH:(your install dir)/(node dir)/bin"

(example : export PATH ="$PATH:/home/ec2-user/mydirectory/node/node4.5.0-linux-x64/bin")

And update npm (only once, don't add to .bashrc):

npm install -g npm

Note that the -g there which means global, really means global to that npm instance which is the instance we just installed and is limited to the current user. This will apply to all packages that npm installs 'globally'.