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Node.js on Older Linux Distributions

At NodeSource, one of our primary missions is to encourage adoption of Node.js as much as possible. One of the ways we do this is by supplying binary packages of Node in formats compatible with the package management systems of various Linux Distributions, so long as those distributions are still getting security updates from their respective sponsor entities.

Unfortunately, this is more complicated in certain instances than in others. Due to the extremely long support cycles of some releases, such as LTS releases for Ubuntu, the components that the distributions ship with are not always sufficient to build or sometimes even to run very new and fast-moving software such as Node.

Debian Style Distributions

Two such examples that highlight this situation are the Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Precise releases. Both are still currently receiving security updates. However, the default versions of the C++ compilers that each ships with are not modern enough to build the current iterations of the V8 Javascript engine.

In order to get around this issue, we build the packages <= v6.x for Debian Wheezy with clang-3.4. Ubuntu Precise ships with clang-3.4 available, so we use that instead of GCC.

The current expectation for v7.x of Node is that going forward, it will require use of even newer parts of the C++ standard than v6.x did. This will in turn require a compiler newer than both the gcc that ships on these distributions and clang-3.4. For this reason, we do not support Wheezy or Precise on version 7.x of Node.

The relevant bits of our build scripts to install the needed compilers looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

if [ "x${DIST}" == "xprecise" ]; then
  echo "Calling $0"
  apt-get update
  apt-get install -y clang-3.4
fi

if [ "x${DIST}" == "xwheezy" ]; then
  echo "Calling $0"
  apt-get update
  apt-get -y install curl apt-transport-https ca-certificates
  echo "deb https://deb.nodesource.com/clang-3.4 wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  curl -s https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | apt-key add -
  apt-get update
  apt-get install -y clang-3.4
fi

To actually use these compilers during the build, the scripts look like this:

if [ "x${DIST}" == "xprecise" ]; then
  CC=/usr/bin/clang
  export CC
  CXX=/usr/bin/clang++
  export CXX
fi

if [ "x${DIST}" == "xwheezy" ]; then
  CC=/usr/bin/clang
  export CC
  CXX=/usr/bin/clang++
  export CXX
fi

Please note that arm builds are not available for these two distributions, as we don't have compilers available for that target.

RedHat Style Distributions

Another example of this circumstance is RHEL6 / CentOS6 which use rpm packages. Much like in the Debian Style examples above, EL6 does not ship with a C++ compiler that can build a modern version of V8. Additionally, the version of python in the distribution is not new enough to properly execute the configure script for the build.

Fortunately, RedHat supports SoftwareCollections.org and these collections can provide EL6 with newer versions of GCC and python.

If you are running EL6 with our rpm packages for Node, and you intend to build any native add-on modules, you need to install and enable both of these collections by following the instructions at the links above.

Also please note that for EL6, only the x86_64 architecture is supported, as the aforementioned software collections do not have 32bit support.