Amazon EC2 is a cloud-based hosting service that is free for 1 year for new customers. You can host your website, blog, any experiment project on a dedicated Linux box.
I have been looking for VPS hosting service to host my Node.js demos because shared hosting is still not providing this service. After all my research, Amazon ec2 is my choice.
In this post, I’ll take you through step by step configuration and installation of the Nodejs development environment in the Amazon EC2 Linux box.
Table of Contents
NodeJS in Amazon EC2
If you are going to follow each step then completion will take around 30-40 minutes. We are going to cover following steps. If you have done any steps already, I suggest you to jump on the next one.
- AWS account creation at Amazon
- Launch EC2 instance and configure it
- Setup Node.js development environment
Step 1 : Create account at Amazon AWS
Go to Amazon EC2 page and create new account. They will ask you to provide billing information so make sure you have a supported credit card. They won’t charge you for first-year but billing after completion of the free year.
Step 2 : Launch EC2 instance
Login to AWS console. You should see a screen like below. Click on “EC2” in the “Compute” section.
Click on Instances and then click on “Launch Instances”. This will take you to a setup wizard. The first step is choosing an Operating System for your EC2 instance. Choose anyone you are familiar with, I chose Amazon Linux.
Next, you need to choose the Hardware configuration for your EC2 instance, this is a little technical and choices may vary depending on your need. I chose Intel Xeon 2.5 GHz 1 GB Ram Machine which is default and free for 1 Year.
The next step is the configuration of the EC2 instance. Click on Next and you should see the storage configuration screen.
I chose default i.e 8 GB but in the free tier, you can use up to 30 GB storage. If you want more than that, then they will set up billing accordingly and charge from your credit card.
The next step is tagging Instances which is not that important, you can skip it too. The next screen is important which is configuring the security group. In this, you need to allow HTTP port 80 for your web application.
Click on Add rule, choose type as HTTP and it will automatically assign port 80 to it.
All right, this is it. Review your EC2 instance and click on launch. It will take few minutes to set up and you will see your Amazon EC2 running.
One more thing. Once you click on launch, Amazon will ask you to create key pair which is very important. Select create new pair and give a name to your private key, once done click on “Download keypair” and Launch the instance.
Download this key and store it somewhere, by using this you will be able to connect to your Linux box.
Click on Launch and you should see a similar screen like this in a minute.
Congratulation! Your Amazon EC2 is up and running.
Connecting to your Amazon EC2 Linux box.
I hope you have downloaded your private key somewhere on your computer. Now if you are using Windows you might need to use Putty. I use Mac and I will show you how to connect using basic SSH using our private keypair. You can use SSH on a Linux machine too.
First of all, copy “Public DNS” from the instance screen shown in step 2. Open up your terminal and switch to the folder where you have downloaded the key file.
First set the access mode to this file to readable to you only else Amazon will not consider this file and gives you a message regarding public mode and threat to security. So run this command.
Now to connect to your Amazon EC2 Linux box, run the following command in your Terminal.
For example:
Here is my screen.
All right. You are now connected to your Amazon EC2 box. It’s time to install Node.js and NPM and run a simple Express server.
Installing Node.js and NPM on Amazon EC2
Switch to the home folder using following command.
First of all update the Amazon system using following command.
This is going to take some time so be patient.
Yum package manager has no direct node.js or node repository so you need to manually download and compile the node.js binary package. This step will take some time so make sure you grab a coffee before starting.
1: Install GCC++ and Make
2: Install openssl-dev
3: Install git
Execute these commands one by one and then run the following.
1: Download the latest version of Node.js
Switch to node folder.
In order to install Node.js, you need to switch to the latest branch of it. Current stable version at the time of writing this tutorial is v0.12.2.
Run this command to switch to branch.
Run following commands one by one.
make
sudo make install
The above steps will take around 10-15 minutes to complete. Once done you should be able to use node.js in your Amazon EC2 system.
Install NPM
Before installing any node modules in your system we need to add a path where those modules should get installed. To do so, you need to edit sudoers file. Here is how to do so.
vi /etc/sudoers
Once VI editor is open, find this line.
Once found, press the “i” key to go in insert mode in VI, and at the end of this line add the following.
Or replace it with this.
In order to save your changes, press the ESC key and type “wq” and hit ENTER in VI editor.
All right, let’s install the NPM module.
1: Clone the NPM.
2: Install the NPM.
sudo make install
Wait for few minutes and you are done!
Say “Hello World”
Congratulations! We have finally set up and installed the Amazon EC2 and Node.js. It’s time to test the setup. Let’s create one simple project and print “Hello World”.
Create a new folder and switch to that folder. create package.json using VI and paste this code.
"name": "sample",
"version": "0.0.1",
"dependencies": {
"express": "^4.12.3"
}
}
Run
to install Express.
Create app.js file and paste following code.
var app = express();
app.get("/",function(req,res){
res.send("
Hello from EC2
");});app.listen(80);
Run this app using the following command.
Make sure you use SUDO for it. Visit your public DNS and you should see a screen like this.
Conclusion
Amazon is one of the best cloud services provides and above all they let us try their System for free. You can use it to host your project, blog, website, or anything. We have covered almost everything you need to get started but there are still some configurations left like mapping domains to EC2 instances.
Curious what path you should set your workspace or project in? Do you use the forever module for continuous deployment? Also how do we set domain to server IP address and port it? Also if we set up mongodb would it be wise to host on separate server or same one? How could we connect the two servers together if we did?
Thanks
That’s a good set of question.
1: I have not set any path yet, should be /home/projects ?
2: Yes i use forever.
3: To setup it we need to launch Amazon S3 and map the name space to our domain. I did’t tried it yet.
4: You can host Mongo on same server with port or if you got two server, better have it there.
5: Allow the HTTP port in the second instance and call it via HTTP. Should’t trouble you.
Thanks,
Shahid.
Great Tutorial!.Helped me a lot,Thanks!
Great Tutorial!. helped me a lot
Great tutorial. A few suggestions for silly users like myself.
Node and NPM seem to always have to be run with sudo. So I had to do “sudo npm install” to get express installed.
Also when you make the directory that you put the json file in you want to do that as a sibling to the node folder.
If I’m not mistaken the node and npm folders are just used to build node and npm for the box, but you don’t want to put anything in them.
Saved me a ton of time. Thanks!
Thanks for your tutorial it’s very easy to follow. But there is a problem before installing npm when we have to modify the sudoers file. Even when using sudo su I still can’t modify the file, I got an error “W10: Warning: Changing a readonly file”
You can change the permission of the file using `chmod 0775 /etc/sudoers`. After that you’ll be able to write to the file
To exit the vi editore Esc and wq didn’t do.
This cut from google helped:
To quit the vi editor without saving any changes you’ve made:
If you are currently in insert or append mode, press Esc .
Press : (colon). The cursor should reappear at the lower left corner of the screen beside a colon prompt.
Enter the following: q!
I think npm init will create a package.json file for you.
By the way thanks for the great explanation!
so yea, you can do npm init to generate a package.json file, and then when you install modules make sure to add –save i.e. install express –save this will add module name to package.json
This is the BEST Tutorial.
node has been moved to https://github.com/nodejs/node, please update the document. Thanks for tutorial
Thanks for the update Raza 🙂
Also if you’re installing node v6+ it comes with NPM, no need to install it separately. 🙂
I get the following error on trying to run it:
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-46-64 SampleNodeProject]$ sudo node app.js
events.js:85
throw er; // Unhandled ‘error’ event
^
Error: listen EADDRINUSE
at exports._errnoException (util.js:746:11)
at Server._listen2 (net.js:1146:14)
at listen (net.js:1172:10)
at Server.listen (net.js:1257:5)
at EventEmitter.listen (/home/ec2-user/SampleNodeProject/node_modules/express/lib/application.js:617:24)
at Object. (/home/ec2-user/SampleNodeProject/app.js:8:5)
at Module._compile (module.js:460:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:478:10)
at Module.load (module.js:355:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:310:12)
Searching Google for answers failed. 🙁
There is another Node app running on same port. Try changing port and run.
I tried a different port, and am able to get the server running. However, when I visit the public DNS, I get the Apache test page instead.
That’s because you have not created vhost to route the domain to Nodejs app.
How do I do that? I couldn’t find those instructions in this tutorial.
You need to pass the port number in URL to get to your node app page. Reason why you are getting apache one is because of request at port 80.
I fixed it! Here’s what I did: https://gist.github.com/kentbrew/776580
By the way, thank you for not only writing this helpful tutorial, but providing timely response to my questions so that I can get this ball rolling!
Thank you for sharing the tips.
You mind if i include this in tutorial ? Reason why i have’t done yet is because i had no domain to map while i was writing this tutorial.
Please do.
Hey, requesting you to update the git url to the new https://github.com/nodejs/node.git
Thanks i did.
hi sahid ,
i am having an issue with the nginx server and node.js app which is hosted by AWS , when i shifted my service from http to https (secure) it stopped on the same .actually i made the service api running but i’m not able to process the web app it still stucked at the same page the error is that nginx couldn’t find the public/js folder as it saved on the path .Please help me in resolving this.
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
should work right !
Yes but ubuntu do not get updated frequently as the Github one. So you may not get latest version from Ubuntu repos right after the release of Node.js.
Actually, this is the way to go for Amazon Linux:
https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#enterprise-linux-and-fedora
I don’t know if I did something wrong following the steps but when I go to my public dns nothing is showing ” keeps telling me site cannot be reached “
Can you access that using CURL from server ?
I’m having this issue, I can’t access when using CURL
curl: (7) Failed to connect to ec2-52-40-210-74.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com port 80: Connection refused
Two qs :-
1. After updating sudeors file, and before clone the npm, do we need to get back to ec2-user ?
2. Also, from which folder and user do we need to run this “git clone https://github.com/isaacs/npm.git“
Yes, you need to switch to a normal user.
You can clone at location assuming there is no permission issue. My suggestion is to switch to /home folder and performing cloning and installation.
Great Tutorial. Helped me a lot, Thank you so much.
Hi Shahid,
I’m facing the below error when I tried NPM install after creating PACKAGE.JSON. I also faced some warning during NPM installation. Please suggest some solution to install NPM and comple node js deployment successfully
module.js:340
throw err;
^
Error: Cannot find module ‘proto-list’
at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25)
at Module.require (module.js:362:17)
at require (module.js:378:17)
at Object. (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/ini.js:38:17)
at Module._compile (module.js:449:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:467:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Module.require (module.js:362:17)
For which module it came ?
Anyway, running npm install proto-list should work.
Hi Shahid,
I’m facing the below error while executing the command cd npm, sudo make install. Please support me to resolve the issue
[root@ip-172-31-30-100 npm]# sudo make install
scripts/doc-build.sh doc/cli/npm-access.md man/man1/npm-access.1
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/ec2-user/node/npm’
node cli.js install marked-man –no-global
bash: node: command not found
make[1]: *** [node_modules/.bin/marked-man] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ec2-user/node/npm’
make: *** [man/man1/npm-access.1] Error 2
Seems node not installed.
Hi Shahid,
I had the same problem, the issue is that node is not globally installed, it’s only in your node/ folder.
So, in order to fix that, you should go to you node/ folder and run the following command:
ln -fs out/Release/node /usr/local/bin/node
this commands creates a symbolic link in your user bin folder yo expose the node command.
I hope it will be helpful for you 🙂
Sorry, I said Shahid instead of Vishnu Kumar xD
Isn’t npm already included as part of node v0.12.2? Should it be cloned from github and reinstalled again?
very good tutorial for Amazon service .Thank you for sharing that kind of wonderful knowledge,
please share this thing with Docker and Ngnix server.
Hi there,
Great tutorial. I ended up with node and npm command cannot be found.
the extra line fixed it for me:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
thank u 🙂
Is it ?
Hi Shahid,
Thanks for the great tutorial. I was able to launch the app, install node and npm and run the server on my terminal but I didn’t get any response when I hit my public DNS in the browser. Is there some setup that we need to tweak in the AWS account?
Good tutoril,
Can you please tell me how to open and enter code into app.js file.
I created package.json and app.js file but how can I enter code into app.js.
Thank you.
I had one more problem,
How can i connect with mysql and node in ec2.
In my local host, i connected perfectly with mysql of S3 and node.js. But when I put the same code into AWS instance then it gives “time out error”.
Can you have any solution for this problem.
Hi, I was doing with Vue js on amazon Linux. The server started up with localhost:8080.
But it is not coming up when I try with public DNS.
HTTP port is also open on EC2.
Still, it is failing.