Firstly open up a secure shell into your Pi or open up a console session if you are working directly from the Pi.

We then need to get ourselves a working copy of Node.js. Node.js is a an event driven server side javascript environment. It is essentially the foundation that Node-Red will run on.

For the Pi it has been a pain in the past to get Node.js running but luckily there have been some tweaks made by the clever people out there that make our lives easier.

So go ahead and run the following commands in your terminal window, which will ensure our Pi is up to date and ready to go.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
We then jump in to downloading the latest Pi compatible version of Node.js.
sudo wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb
Due to the download being in a convenient Debian package we can run the install by simply performing the following command.
sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb
Once the installation has run through you can check to see if node.js is available and installed by calling its version as shown below.
We can now move on to installing Node-Red on to our Pi.

This guide was first published on Jan 25, 2014. It was last updated on Jan 25, 2014.

This page (Setting up node.js) was last updated on Jan 21, 2014.

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