Upgrading node.js on aws opsworks

Question

By default aws opsworks provides a node layer with node v0.10.33 . The latest stable version of node.js is 0.12.2. How can I upgrade the node version of my instances in the node layer of opsworks

Answer 1

I have also been looking around for approaches to make this happen in a sustainable way, meaning that the configuration would apply to all instances of a stack. This implies some chef configuration.

Unfortunately, the node version is not configurable via the standard methods described in the customization guide for Opsworks.

So it seems like you would indeed have to write a wrapper cookbook to make this happen. I found this cookbook-wrapper on github and you might want to use or fork it. I have not tested it though, but in general that's the way to go for the moment.

Another problem is that the main reason to use node 0.12+ is using generators and that requires the activation via a harmony flag. The cookbook has to support modifying the harmony-flags in its cookbook attributes to use this feature.