How to install Node.JS and NPM on Raspberry Pi Zero or other ARM V6 device

Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Zero W have the ARM V6 version. If you go to node official website to download the latest version you will find that there is no more support for ARM V6 unfortunately 😔

If you are not sure or you want to check the version of ARM needed on your device you can do this with this command: uname -m

The only option is to download the latest stable version that has ARM V6 version available and that is Node V10.x. You can find the list here

So the steps to install Node V10.x on your Raspberry Pi Zero are:

Download and unzip

Download the latest version available from V10.x. Now it’s v10.24.1, but this can be changed in the future.

wget https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v10.x/node-v10.24.1-linux-armv6l.tar.xz

Unzip it using tar command

tar -xJf node-v10.24.1-linux-armv6l.tar.xz

Copy node to /usr/local

Go to the folder that you just unzip it and copy everything to /usr/local so we can call node and npm from any location globally.

cd node-v10.24.1-linux-armv6l/
sudo cp -R * /usr/local/

Check if everything is working

Check if node and npm are installed correctly. These lines should print the version of node and npm installed.

node -v
npm -v

node and npm versions