Ansible NVM Node

Installs node via NVM on Debians and Redhats.

installation

either

• ansible-galaxy install grzegorznowak.nvm_node
• clone the repo directly

Dislaimer

It's a pretty bespoke installation of node that doesn't rely on any of apt/yum goodies nor it follows the recommended (@see https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/1533) way of using NVM. Additionally versioning is only achievable via Ansible itself. Please make sure the setup given here is the one you actually do require on your end. I would say it's 70% for DEV purposes and 30% for live. And 0% if you plan having many users/roles using it on a single server - it's not going to fly in the current state (though might work at some point with relatively minimal extra love added).

The crux is it installs nvm into a global path and symlinks it back to /usr/local/bin for general accessibility, and hijacks global bashrc to include the NVM's paths for each user on the system. Which although minor, breaks the concept of VNM being a per-user tool, as well as not working 100% flawlessly when specific non-interactive shells are used. This might affect usage of npm installed packages for those cases. However a cool cat as it is, nvm really is the tool of our choice so that's the way we need it and might be you need it too!

Requirements

No dependencies, just note it will install wget to fetch the nvm installation script.

Coverage

Currently builds and integrates on those distros:

Ubuntu: 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, 14.04

Debian: buster, stretch

CentOS: 7

Variables

defaults

    nvm_install_script_version: "0.33.11"   # the nvm installation script to use (latest stable version as of writing this)
    nvm_user_name: "root"                   # you can use a different user, and you might in the end achieve the more nvm-ish approach
                                            # but I've not covered that in tests etc.  
    nvm_dir: "/var/lib/nvm"                 # for global (default) installation. Follow the same rule as the nvm_user_name variable
    nvm_node_version: "8.11.3"              # the node version to install via nvm
    nvm_install_globally: []                # libraries to intall globally and symlink, look further down for details

Example playbook

when cloned from github

    ---
    - hosts: all
      vars:
        nvm_node_version: "4.1.1"
      roles:
        - role: ansible-nvm-node

when from ansible-galaxy

    ---
    - hosts: all
      vars:
        nvm_node_version: "your.node.version"
      roles:
        - role: grzegorznowak.nvm_node        

Upgrading node

Simply replace nvm_node_version with whatever version you want to be using globally and rerun the playbook

Installing global packages

For the best coherency you are strongly encouraged to install global packages using this role too, in which case just edit the nvm_install_globally variable, as follows:

nvm_install_globally: ['gulp']

also can use version targeting for global packages:

nvm_install_globally:
  - name: yarn
    version: 1.9.4

or mix both:

nvm_install_globally:
  - gulp
  - lighthouse
  - name: yarn
    version: 1.9.4

and that will install listed libraries and put a symlink to global $PATH for specific environments to access it (like cron)

Testing

Requirements

you may use a helper script that will install virtual env with all the needed stuff ./bootstrap_test.sh

the simply activate the virtualenv with source test_env/bin/activate

or just do it 100% manually for better control

sudo apt install virtualenv python3-pip
virtualenv test_env --python=python3
source test_env/bin/activate
pip install -r test-requirements.txt

Testing with lxc containers

molecule test

Additional perks from molecule

You can do all sort of super handy stuff like molecule converge to simply bring instance(s) at will and then tear them down with molecule destroy. The sky is the limit here really!

Sponsored by

Kwiziq.com - The AI language education platform

Spottmedia.com - Technology design, delivery and consulting

Author Information

brought to you with love from Grzegorz Nowak.