Installation problems on Debian Jessie

[fedwiki]

Installation problems on Debian Jessie

[almereyda]

This is a known weirdness of the Debian packaging for the nodejs package.
You can work around globally by creating a symlink.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Source: https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager
Official installation instructions for Node.js can be found at https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions and also mention this behaviour:

A Node.js package is also available in the official repo for Debian Sid (unstable), Jessie (testing) and Wheezy (wheezy-backports) as "nodejs". It only installs a nodejs binary, so you might want to ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node for many things to work.

Can you confirm we can close this issue?

[almereyda]

What do node -v and which node return on your shell?
Do you use nvm?

[i2p-lbt]

Nothing, like in command not found. As in the quoted text, I have to issue nodejs -v and then it says v0.10.29. I just found if I edit /usr/local/lib/node_modules/wiki/index.js and make the first line a #!/usr/bin/env nodejs, then the server comes up. And I don't know about nvm (I'm new to this node-stuff actually).

This should be documented somewhere, though. I assume it already is, but only found the wiki-pages of the original repo of Ward so far. No idea if you could modify the code to autodetect this on Debian. I'll leave this open for now until I found out how to address the documenation - or where it hides ;)

[i2p-lbt]

Thx 4 pointing that out and sorry for not finding it myself - was stuck on searching in conjunction with "fedwiki" I guess. And yes, although I got the feeling there might be other users running into this trap. May I suggest to adding an according hint to the readme.md? I'd draft one if you want ...

[almereyda]

Hmm. I don't see as a specific wiki isuue, as all npm modules which offer a
CLI would kind of need this addition. Maybe there is a place with an
overview of Node.js installation options? (Self-compilation, Package
Managers, nvm, etc.)

On 2 November 2015 at 14:39, i2p-lbt [email protected] wrote:

Thx 4 pointing that out and sorry for not finding it myself - was stuck on
searching in conjunction with "fedwiki" I guess. And yes, although I got
the feeling there might be other users running into this trap. May I
suggest to adding an according hint to the readme.md? I'd draft one if
you want ...

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#61 (comment).

[i2p-lbt]

Sure, it's not "your problem" or anything. But any people attempting to install under a Debian-based system and without knowledge about node.js will run into this problem. I didn't find it straight-forward to find the solution, it did cost me time. Reading error-output, hacking it to work, finding out about the general work-around (thx to you). It would just have been a few lines in your readme.md to point this out and make it easier for those affected. But no problem if you do not want that, I just thought this might be a little improvement worth including ... Closing this then. Sorry if I wasted your time. And thank you again for your help.

[almereyda]

No, you didn't waste our time at all. Unfortunately I am not a maintainer
of this project and will not make any design decisions on how the
documentation should look like. Should we probably introduce a seperate
README for different deployment options? There's already NPM, different
distributions, Docker, PaaS and several other deployment options available.
We could use this thread to sketch a Deployment.md together, if you are
interested.

On 3 November 2015 at 15:36, i2p-lbt [email protected] wrote:

Sure, it's not "your problem" or anything. But any people attempting to
install under a Debian-based system and without knowledge about node.js
will run into this problem. I didn't find it straight-forward to find the
solution, it did cost me time. Reading error-output, hacking it to work,
finding out about the general work-around (thx to you). It would just have
been a few lines in your readme.md to point this out and make it easier
for those affected. But no problem if you do not want that, I just thought
this might be a little improvement worth including ... Closing this then.
Sorry if I wasted your time. And thank you again for your help.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#61 (comment).

[i2p-lbt]

Well, I can't make those "decisions" either I guess? You asked for this to be closed, so I did that. I had drafted something into my cloned readme.md already. In case there is interest to include this somewhere, I am more than willing to draft something again (as I deleted that other change already). Here we go:

Note on Debian: the Debian node.js package uses a different naming (i.e. nodejs instead of node.js). You will either need to adapt the wiki-sources or do ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node as a general workaround. Both might have implications on maintainance. See /usr/share/doc/nodejs/README.Debian for more information.

Feel free to add this anywhere you think it's appropriate, I still feel it might lower the start-up difficulties for some users quite some. This information is contained in the output during installation. However, in my case there were quite some optional dependencies producing warnings, so it was a "searching in the scroll" and fairly easy to overlook.

[WardCunningham]

@i2p-lbt welcome to federated wiki.
@almereyda thank you for your assistance with this issue.

We once tried to maintain a github wiki with install advice but it was never very complete and fell into disuse as we separated our repositories from my personal account.

I hope someday to see platform based self-help communities offering all kinds of advice by writing in federated wiki itself. An embryonic version of this exists with a slant toward digital ocean.
http://admin.asia.wiki.org/

[i2p-lbt]

Thx 4 the welcome and thx 4 the link. Very interesting content there that I wasn't able to find yesterday while trying to follow all (?) links from fed.wiki.org. I found it hard to find documentation, especially technical. Maybe consider composing an overview with important starting points for reading and pointing to that very clearly? For example including a hint to admin.asia and your suggestion how to document there? Although that domain sounds ... asia-specific, I first expected to find Mandarin there ;) My problems might be due to the disabled js though. It seems admin.asia is more friendly on non-js than fed.wiki.org btw. ...