Building node.js on Solaris 10

Constantly on the search for new tools and technologies to play with, I wanted to actually try out Node.js on my own machine.

I'm running Solaris 10 (x86), and it didn't quite work out first time. But it was pretty trivial to fix. A couple of tweaks to the configure invocation and a simple patch to make things like isnan and signbit work with a vanilla Solaris 10 install.

So, to build Node on Solaris 10 x86:

First download node-0.4.8 and my node patch. (Yes, the patch to V8 is ugly, and it's likely to be specific to the V8 version and the Solaris rev and gcc version. And don't expect Node or V8 to work on sparc at all.)

Unpack node and apply the patch:

gzcat node-v0.4.8.tar.gz | gtar xf -
gpatch -p0 -i node-v0.4.8.soldiff

Then configure and build:

env CFLAGS=-std=gnu99 ./configure --prefix=/opt/Node --without-ssl
gmake -j 8
gmake install

Replacing /opt/Node with wherever you want to install it. (Somewhere you have permission to write to, obviously.)

You then want to install npm. You will need to have curl for this, although I recommend downloading the install.sh and running it by hand, like so:

env PATH=/opt/Node/bin:$PATH TAR=gtar bash install.sh

This way, it uses the correct version of tar and uses a compatible shell. (It actually invokes curl in the script, so you still need curl installed. That's not hard, or you can find one on the Companion CD.)

To actually use npm you need to continue with the tweaks. For example:

env PATH=/opt/Node/bin:$PATH TAR=gtar npm install express

or, if you want it to install express into the Node tree rather than "." you'll need something like:

env PATH=/opt/Node/bin:$PATH TAR=gtar npm install -g express