First we need to ensure we have the latest stable version of Node installed. A quick way to check is to open a terminal and run

node -v

If the command isn't found or the version is less than 0.10.x then we'll need install or upgrade Node.

If you are running on a fresh linux installation, you might miss some packages for building node.js from source.

On a standard Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release (like on AWS):

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc g++ make

Open a terminal, and type:

curl -O http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.32/node-v0.10.32.tar.gz
tar -xvf node-v0.10.32.tar.gz
cd node-v0.10.32
./configure
make 
sudo make install

Check on the node.js download page that you are downloading the latest version in the 0.10.x series.

Prefer this method to using a distros installer (like apt-get, yum, etc) as versions tend to lag behind the latest release and Debian-like system in particular install the Node executable as nodejs which tends to break command line scripts (so you have to set up soft links).

Another alternative is to use nvm, which allows you to install any node.js version.

A great way to quickly upgrade is to run the following in our terminal

sudo npm i -g n
sudo n stable

nscale also depends on Git, we can check whether this is installed by opening a terminal and typing

git --version

If we recieve a command not found error, then there's a number of ways we can install. The easiest option install with our distros package manager, various commands for different package managers are listed here

Alternatively we can build from source by downloading the latest release from git's releases page

tar -xvf git-2.1.0.tar.gz # <-- example file name
cd git-2.1.0
make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

nscale uses both and git and Github extensively, in order for commands like nsd system clone to work. We need to have the git user name and email set to our Github login and have ssh-keys set up with Github.

To set our Github use and email we do:

git config --global user.name "<user name>"
git config --global user.email "<email>"

To generate keys:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "<email>"

Finally we can copy the contents of id_rsa.pub (having chosen where to store it with ssh-keygen) to Github (see Adding SSH keys to Github for help).

We can test if our keys are correctly set up like so:

ssh -T -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" [email protected]

If we're correctly set up, Github will respond that we're succesfully authenticated.

Docker provides containers, that can be thought of as isolated environments that provide the benefits of running virtual machines but at much lower resource cost (see What is Docker for more).

If we don't have docker installed, we'll need to locate an installation guide for our particular distro or we can try downloading the binaries (prefer the packages though).

The main NPM module for nscale is called nscale.

To install nscale we simply run

sudo npm i -g nscale

This will provide an executable named nsd (standing for nscale Deployer), which is the main tool for managing distrubuted systems deployment.

We can test that the install was successful by attempting to run the executable:

nsd

This should show the help output.

• Linux Development Quick Start Guide