Friday 25 October 2013

Installing Harp on Debian Jessie

I recently came across the new open source web server called Harp.
Here is the description from the Harp website;


What is Harp?

Harp is a zero-configuration web server that is used to serve static assets. It has a built in asset pipeline for serving .jade, .markdown, .ejs, .coffee, .less, .styl as .html, .css, and .js. Harp supports a template agnostic layout/partial system and metadata for dynamically building files.


I thought I would take Harp for a drive around the block and decided to install it on a Debian Jessie virtual machine.
The installation process is rather easy except for one issue due to the Node.js package.

Here is the process to install Harp.

Firstly there are some prerequisites to get Harp installed being Node.js and npm, the package manager for Node.   I decided to install Node and npm using the Debian package repositories with these commands.

apt-get update
apt-get install nodejs npm

Once Node is installed, you can install Harp using the Node package manager.

npm install harp -g

The -g switch in the above command tells the package manager to make the Harp install global rather than a local directory install.

Harp is now installed and everything should be ready to go!   There is a problem though.   If you run the following command.

harp --version

You will get an error which is very misleading.

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

You can be forgiven for thinking that the harp binary was not found.   This is not the case.   The problem here is Harp is trying to call Node.js by using the command 'node' while on a Debian system the Node command is 'nodejs'.

This is easy to fix with the following symbolic link.   Simply run this command.

ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Now if you run Harp everything works as expected.

harp --version
0.9.4

All that is left is to follow the instructions on getting started to use the Harp web server.


2 comments:

  1. Great post. I wasn't aware of the node/nodejs difference on Debian. Are you aware of a fix in harp that can be done to get around this issue?

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    Replies
    1. Hi Brock. The shebang declaration at the top of this file is where the problem is.
      https://github.com/sintaxi/harp/blob/master/bin/harp

      If you read through Wikipedia about the shebang it sounds like the declaration does not support an "if exists" type of feature.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)

      Is there another option for calling the node interpreter?

      It would be nice if Harp would just run on Debian without the symbolic link.

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