Appendix A. Installing Node and community add-ons
Node is easy to install on most operating systems. Node can either be installed using conventional application installers or by using the command line. Command-line installation is easy on OS X and Linux, but it’s not recommended for Windows.
To help you get started, the following sections detail the Node installation on OS X, Windows, and Linux operating systems. The last section in this appendix explains how you can use the Node Package Manager (npm) to find and install useful add-ons.
Installing Node on OS X is quite straightforward. The official installer (http://nodejs.org/#download), shown in figure A.1, provides an easy way to install a precompiled version of Node and npm.
If you’d rather install from source, you can either use a tool called Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/), which automates installation from source, or you can manually install from source. Installing Node from source on OS X, however, requires you to have Xcode developer tools installed.