NPM Packages on Windows
With all of the progress on getting node.js to run on windows people may want to start writing complex apps with it. Well at least apps that use more than what’s shipped with it. Now on Linux or OS X that means using npm. Unfortunately npm is still a long way off for windows by the looks of things (it currently uses symlinks and Windows XP doesn’t have symlinks) but you can still use all of those packages at npmjs.org it just means more work.
First find a package you will want to use. In this case I want to write a new web app with express.js. Express.js is a web framework for node and is similar to sinatra for ruby. You can use the search functionality available on the npm site to find the express package. You will see the description, version, dependencies, repository, and node engines listed. Take note of the dependencies, you will have to repeat these steps for all the dependencies. Download the latest tgz file (at the time I’m writing this, it’s 2.4.6) Unpack the file and rename the folder from package to express. Repeat that for connect, qs, and mime, as well as jade (or any other template engine you want to use.
After downloading and renaming all the packages, copy them to a folder called node_modules in your project. You will want to make sure you add the folder to your ignore list for your version control. Unless you’re going to deploy to a windows machine with IISNode as solutions like Heroku and Nodester will install your dependencies for you.
Finally you will want to create a package.json and list your dependencies so when you deploy or someone wants to use your app they can use npm to install the dependencies and run your app.
So you should end up with a project directory that looks something like this
root
|—node_modules
| |—connect
| |—express
| |—jade
| |—mime
| |—qs
|—public
|—views
|—app.js
|—package.json
Hopefully this all makes sense, and here’s hoping that npm will be coming to windows in the near future. So get going and write some node apps.
