Mac OS X

There is a universal installer available from the Node website specifically for OS X.

We need to follow these steps to install Node.js on a Mac:

You may install Node.js via the respective package manager:

Windows

To install Node.js on Windows, we will follow these steps:

Also, if you have any of the Windows package managers installed, then you don't need to manually download the installer. You may install Node.js via the respective package manager:

Linux

Because there are so many different flavors and distributions of Linux available, installing Node isn't quite as straightforward. However, if you're running Linux to begin with, then you are more than aware of this and probably comfortable with a few extra steps.

Joyent has an excellent wiki on how to install Node on Linux using the many different package manager options available. This covers almost all the popular deb and rpm based package managers. You can read that wiki by visiting:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager

For Ubuntu 12.04 and above as an example, the steps to install Node would be as follows:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-dev npm

Once these steps have been completed, both Node and npm should be installed on your system.

Testing whether Node.js is installed properly

Now that Node has been installed on your system, let's run a quick test to ensure everything is working properly.

Access a command line via your terminal program and execute the following command:

$ node --version
v0.10.35

$ npm --version
2.1.14

Assuming that your Node installation was successful, you should see the version number that was installed as an output on the screen right below the command you executed.

You can also launch the Node repl, a command-line shell that lets you execute JavaScript directly:

$ node
> console.log('Hello world!')
Hello World!
Undefined
[press Ctrl-C twice to exit]

Online documentation

You'll want to be sure to point your browser to the online documentation for Node and bookmark it, as it will undoubtedly become a resource that you will want to access on a regular basis. It is not mandatory that you should go through each and every section of it, but once you start writing code in Node.js, you will need to refer to this document frequently to understand more on the apis exposed by Node.js. The document is available at: http://nodejs.org/api/.

Also, check out the npm registry available at http://npmjs.com where you can find tens of thousands of modules available for Node developers.