EC2 User data is probably the best way to bootstrap your instance. While AWS Documentation provides a great way to install Node.js on EC2 server once it is up, instructions provided in there are a little tricky to put together in a user data script / command. Primary reason being that the instructions don’t use a standard package manager (yum / apt-get).
Here is the simplest way to achieve that with a shell script, you can specify it in the User data
Here’s a screenshot
install_node.sh
1 2 3 4 | USER=ec2-user # For Ubuntu AMI mention ubuntu etc. NODE_VERSION=node # installs latest, for specific mention version number e.g. 8.9.4 su - $USER -c "#!/bin/bash; cd ~ ;curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.32.0/install.sh > install.sh;chmod +x install.sh;./install.sh; cd .nvm ; chmod +x nvm.sh ;. ./nvm.sh ; nvm install $NODE_VERSION" |
Copy the above content into a file on your computer and provide that for user data (Configure Instance -> Advanced Details -> User data, select As file and provide this file)
The script installs the latest version of node but you can also specify a particular version, for example to install version 8.9.4, assign version number like this
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| NODE_VERSION=8.9.4 # installs latest, for specific mention version number e.g. 8.9.4
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In case of AMIs other than Amazon Linux please update the USER for example in case of an Ubuntu AMI, assign following
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| USER=ubuntu # For Ubuntu AMI mention ubuntu etc.
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Script Actions
- Download the NVM (node version manager) install script
- Changes permissions to make it executable
- Installs NVM
- Loads NVM paths to profile
- Installs Node.js
Installation Verification
Once the EC2 instance is provisioned and running, login and run following command
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| node -v
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Installation logs can be found in /var/log/cloud-init-output.log
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | # /var/log/cloud-init-output.log Installing Node.js for ec2-user version (node) % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed ^M 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0^M100 10007 100 10007 0 0 43334 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 43508 => Downloading nvm as script to '/home/ec2-user/.nvm' => Appending source string to /home/ec2-user/.bashrc => Close and reopen your terminal to start using nvm or run the following to use it now: export NVM_DIR="/home/ec2-user/.nvm" [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && . "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm ######################################################################## 100.0% Computing checksum with sha256sum Checksums matched! Now using node v11.8.0 (npm v6.5.0) |
