Setup a pi for node development

Raspberry pi's are awesome little pieces of hardware. I've developed an internet radio, a torrent video player, and a scrum board display all running on the low-power device.

One of the things I battled with was getting the device setup with node quickly to start development. Below is what I've found to work reliably.

Note: The Pi's SSH session will be represented with pi$, and local machine with $

Install Raspbian

Download Raspbian Lite. I would always suggest downloading the latest version avalable. Instructions to flash the SD card are up on the RPI installing images page.

Enable SSH

Enable SSH on boot. Do this by placing a blank file saved with the name ssh - no extension, on the SD card /boot partition.

The SD /boot partition should be accessible via your machines default file browser.

Alternatively you can do this via terminal: on a mac

$ diskutil list

# look for the raspberry pi SD card and copy down the path
# it'll most likely be /dev/disk2

$ touch <PATH OF RASPBERRY SD CARD>/boot/ssh

Finally plug in the pi to your router, slip in the SD card, power it on.

SSH in

Either use Angry IP, or login to your home router (usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1) and find the IP address of the pi. You can also try using the pi device name raspberrypi

Open terminal and start up an SSH session, logging in as the default user pi, password raspberry.

$ ssh pi@<YOUR PI IP>
# or try ssh pi@raspberrypi - your network may support it

The authenticity of host ...

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
$ yes

Warning: Permanently added ...
pi@<YOUR PI IP>s password:
$ raspberry

...

pi@raspberrypi:~ $

We're in!

Raspi-config

Two important steps are to expand your pi's filesystem and change the password. This is done via raspi-config

pi$ sudo raspi-config

# Select first option
# Once complete change your pi user's password via option 2

pi$ sudo reboot

Install Node

I always recommend using nvm - even more so with a raspberry pi as it can be a real pain.

Depending on the version of the ARM chipset, you'll need to find the appropriate nodejs binary, or compile it yourself. nvm handles all of this for you.

As per installation steps on the nvm website:

# Get NVM
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/<GET THE LATEST VERSION FROM WEBSITE>/install.sh | bash

# Install latest lts node
pi$ nvm install node --lts

pi$ sudo reboot

# Let the pi reboot then SSH back in

# To verify that nvm has been installed, do:
pi$ command -v nvm
# which should output 'nvm' if the installation was successful.

Install mplayer

This step is optional, but mplayer is a neat little terminal program allows us to stream internet radio.

pi$ sudo apt-get install -y mplayer2

# Test it out - dont forget to plug something in to your audio out
pi$ mplayer http://listen.181fm.com/181-eagle_128k.mp3

Comments?