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node-build is a tool that downloads and compiles various versions of Node. It is exposed as nodenv install through nodenv or simply as node-build when used standalone.

• Updating node-build
• Troubleshooting
• Writing custom build definitions

Suggested build environment

node-build will try its best to download and compile the wanted Node version, but sometimes compilation fails because of unmet system dependencies, or compilation succeeds but the new Node version exhibits weird failures at runtime. We recommend nodejs' guide for building from source and setting up your system with the necessary pre-requisites.

Notes

Updating node-build

If you have trouble installing a Node version, first try to update node-build to get the latest bug fixes and Node definitions.

First locate it on your system:

which node-build
ls "$(nodenv root)"/plugins

If it's in /usr/local/bin on a Mac, you've probably installed it via Homebrew:

brew upgrade node-build

Or, if you have it installed via git as an nodenv plugin:

cd "$(nodenv root)"/plugins/node-build && git pull

Troubleshooting

"mkdir: /Volumes/Macintosh: Not a directory"

This can occur if you have more than one disk drive and your home directory is physically mounted on a volume that might have a space in its name, such as "Macintosh HD":

$ df
/dev/disk2    ...  /
/dev/disk1s2  ...  /Volumes/Macintosh HD

The easiest solution is to avoid building a Node version to any path that has space characters in it. So instead of building into ~/.nodenv/versions/<version>, which is the default for nodenv install <version>, instead you could install into /opt/nodes/<version> and symlink /opt/nodes as ~/.nodenv/versions so nodenv continues to work as before:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/nodes
sudo chown "${USER}:staff" /opt/nodes
rm -rf ~/.nodenv/versions                 # This will DELETE your existing Node versions!
ln -s /opt/nodes ~/.nodenv/versions

Now proceed as following:

ruby-build <version> /opt/nodes/<version>

No space left on device

Some distributions will mount a tmpfs partition with low disk space to /tmp, such as 250 MB. You can check this with:

mount | grep tmp
df -h | grep tmp

Compiling MRI requires at least 265 MB, so you should temporarily resize /tmp to allow more usage:

rm -rf /tmp/node-build*
mount -o remount,size=300M,noatime /tmp

Lower the number of parallel jobs

On hosts that report a large amount of CPU cores, but don't have plenty of RAM, you might get:

gcc: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1)

The solution is to use MAKE_OPTS=-j2 to limit make to maximum of 2 parallel processes:

export MAKE_OPTS=-j2

or also with writable temp directory:

TMPDIR=~/tmp MAKE_OPTS=-j2 nodenv install 8.0.0