I recently ended up with a low-end box with CentOS 7. After a long, long time, I got to try out skills on anything other than a managed Ubuntu / RHEL / Windows server/client. The fact that the box depended on me to get the app running was exciting but scary.

After some fidgeting around, I got down to business with getting the basic OS configured. It was time to install NodeJS.

The days of building everything from scratch is gone - thankfully. So, it was with some confidence I went to NodeSource distribution instructions.

The very first command is -

curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | bash -

This did nothing. Using sudo, root, and the neighborhood dog’s name did not help.

After trying out some outdated instructions on 2-3 websites, I came to know that curl was infact working. However, it silently failed since the package was not signed.

Yeah, right.

Changed curl to accept unsigned packages..

curl -skL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | bash -

.. which comes to another halt since CentOS 7 (which happens to be the latest version), does not have a NodeSource distribution for Node 11.

I did what any self-respecting developer will do. Change the operating system to something that can support the latest and greatest. We don’t live on the bleeding edge production environments for nothing.

I went back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Yes, not quite recent but there were no other options on the God-forsaken VPS hosting provider.

Ubuntu has one thing right - it is loved by 1000s of developers and I had no problem finding any Node distribution that I take fancy to - no build required :)