The Node project provides a node.exe file that you may download and call without installing anything on your system. Visit http://nodejs.org/download/, and look for Windows Binary.

Download that file and put it in a directory you'll remember. Now you can call the file from the command line using the full path, as follows:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Ian\Software\node" -v

To save yourself some typing, you'll probably want to add that directory to your path. Once you do that, you can just call node without the full path.

Chocolatey is a package management system for Windows based on NuGet and Powershell. It is modeled on package managers for other systems, but is designed to deal with the Windows environment. It provides simple installation of many developer tools and libraries.

To install Node using Chocolatey, simply use the command-line installer:

cinst nodejs.install

The easiest way to install Node on Linux is to use the package manager for your particular distribution. Most distributions offer a Node package, which will save the trouble of building it manually. If your distribution does not offer a Node package, see the Compiling Node.js manually section at the end of this chapter.

Using a graphical package manager

If you have a graphical utility to manage your system, such as Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic, you can use that. Open the program and search for "nodejs". You will see a result similar to the following screenshot. Choose Install and wait until it informs you that it is finished.

sudo apt-get install nodejs

sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy

sudo pacman -S nodejs

sudo yum install npm

If you cannot install Node using one of the methods listed earlier, you may be able to compile it from source. This will work on most UNIX-like systems (including Mac OSX, Linux, and BSD). You may need some perseverance—compiling software from source often involves a few hiccups along the way. Remember, if you get stuck, a search engine is your best friend.

First let's install the dependencies we'll need to build Node. These include a C++ compiler, the make build tool, and Python (which is used in the build process).

sudo apt-get install python g++ make

Now we need to download the Node source code. Visit http://nodejs.org/download/ and choose Source Code. Save it to somewhere you can remember, say ~/Downloads.

Let's visit the directory where you saved the file and unpack it. Note that the filename will have a version number in it that may be different from what is printed on the screenshot and in the command-line instructions.

cd ~/Downloads
tar xzvf node-v0.8.15.tar.gz
cd node-v0.8.15/

Now we'll prepare, build, and install Node. Be patient—these commands can take a while to complete!

./configure
sudo make install

On certain systems, it may be possible to install CoffeeScript as a system package, rather than installing Node first as we are doing. For example, older versions of Homebrew offered a coffeescript package, and Ubuntu provides a CoffeeScript package that can be installed through apt.

However, these packages may be buggy or out-of-date, and you may find it difficult to control which version of the CoffeeScript package you are using. You will be at the mercy of a package maintainer (who may not even be actively updating the package any more). I strongly encourage you to follow the process detailed in the earlier sections of this chapter . Once you have installed Node, it will be very easy to manage your CoffeeScript installation, and you'll be glad you took this route.