Installing Node.js

Download and install Node.js from its website using the available binary packages. At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Node.js was 0.12.4. All examples are guaranteed to work with this version.

Node.js comes with a package manager called Node Package Manager (NPM), which is responsible for managing and installing all Node.js dependencies and libraries. Think of it as pip for Python or cpan for Perl.

We recommend that you create a folder called redis-essentials to save all the files and libraries necessary for running the examples. We also recommend that you create one folder for each chapter of this book for organization purposes.

All Node.js examples in this book require the library redis, which can be installed with NPM:

$ cd redis-essentials
$ npm install redis

NPM will create a folder called node_modules. This is where the redis client is installed.