AWS IoT and Node.js on the Raspberry Pi

There are many approaches for installing node.js on the Raspberry Pi (Google and you’ll find lots of guides), presumably because for a while there didn’t seem to be any official binaries in the official apt repos so people were building and sharing their own.

I installed a version from somewhere (can’t actually remember where as it was a while back) and it doesn’t support ES6 class syntax used by some of the dependent libraries in the AWS IoT SDK:

$ node index.js
/home/pi/aws-iot-nodejs-pi-lights/node_modules/aws-iot-device-sdk/node_modules/mqtt/node_modules/websocket-stream/server.js:6
class Server extends WebSocketServer{
^^^^^
SyntaxError: Unexpected reserved word
    at Module._compile (module.js:439:25)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
    at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
    at require (module.js:380:17)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/pi/aws-iot-nodejs-pi-lights/node_modules/aws-iot-device-sdk/node_modules/mqtt/node_modules/websocket-stream/index.js:2:14)
    at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)

The version I currently have installed is:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ node -v
v0.10.29

Since I’m not sure where this version came from originally, (and apt-get upgrade is not finding any updates), I uninstalled:

sudo apt-get remove nodejs
sudo apt-get remove npm

Then I followed the steps in the AWS IoT SDK guide here to install using the version provided from Adafruit’s repo  (official node.js binaries for ARM are also available from nodejs.org here).

With version provided from Adafruit, this gives v 0.12.6 but unfortunately this still gives the same error with the ES6 class keyword.

$ node -v
v0.12.6

Next, lets try the ARM version from nodejs.org. There’s step by step instructions here showing how to download the tar, extract and copy to /usr/local/

Now we have:

$ node -v
v8.9.1

And now trying to run my AWS IoT node.js based app, success!

 

 

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