Installing nodeJS on debian lenny.

This article describes what I did to compile and install nodejs on debian lenny running at linode.

The following is not directly related to node.js but happened while I was working on this installation so here, maybe it will help someone:

For some reason, apt-get did not properly work for me,

the first thing was that I did not have curl installed but tring to install it did not work.

to make a long (very long) story short, turns out I was unable to install curl because I had a problem with the PGP keys for the debian archives.

This comment was the one that led my to:
aptitude install debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring.
following this fix and a successful apt-get update I was able to run

apt-get install curl

so, to get build and install node.js you run the following commands:

apt-get install python

apt-get install curl build-essential openssl libssl-dev

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.6.6/node-v0.6.6.tar.gz

tar -xzvf node-v0.6.6.tar.gz

cd node-v0.6.6

./configure

make

sudo make install

There, you should now have node.js installed.
create yourself a folder for the scripts you plan to write.

if you need access to mysql from your scripts I recommend you use npm (node package manager) :

npm find mysql

npm install mysql

please note that this will install the mysql modules under node_modules folder under the current directory so that you can use mysql=require('mysql') in your scripts.

good luck and enjoy.