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Running node.js on a Raspberry Pi Zero

This post assumes your Raspberry Pi is already setup and you can SSH into it. If not, have a Google and come back. I’ll wait.

The Raspberry Pi Zero (and the original Raspberry Pi) use an ARMv6 CPU. Unfortunately apt-get install nodejs installs a version of node built for ARMv7, so we’ll have to install it manually.

Raspberry Pi Zero

Download

  • Download the version of node you want, in this case I’m downloading v7.7.2 for ARMv6. Other versions can be found here.

wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v7.7.2/node-v7.7.2-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

  • Extract the files once the download has completed.

tar -xzf node-v7.7.2-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

Install

  • Copy the files into /user/local

sudo cp -R node-v7.7.2-linux-armv6l/* /usr/local/

Add to path

To use the node and npm commands you need to add the location we installed node (/user/local/bin) to your path.

  • Open "~/.profile" for editing (I'm using nano)

nano ~/.profile

  • Add PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin at the end then press ctrl + x to exit. Type yes to save.

Clean up

We should now remove the downloaded files to keep the file system clean.

  • Remove the tarball

rm ~/node-v7.7.2-linux-armv6l.tar.gz

  • Remove the extracted files

rm -r ~/node-v7.7.2-linux-armv6l

Test

  • Check that node is working with node -v which will return the installed version, in my case v7.7.2.
  • Check that npm is working with npm -v which will return the installed version, in my case v4.1.2.