Problems Installing Node.js on OS X Lion
Oct 07
I’ve been wanting to try Node.js for some time and finally got around to it last night. I’ve had all sorts of little problems after upgrading to OS X Lion and ran into one when compiling Node.js. I was following the howto guide on the Node wiki page and received an error when running ./configure. The error stated:
/Users/db/_dev/nodejs/wscript:232: error: could not configure a cxx compiler!
which looked like this:

It turns out that after upgrading to OS X Lion that my g++ and c++ compilers were no longer working. Instead of digging into the root cause I decided to upgrade to Xcode 4.1.1 from the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, this was a 3.1 GB download so I had to wait a bit before I could continue with my Node.js install.
After Xcode was downloaded the App Store showed that it was installed as you can see here:

But unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The file had only been downloaded and not installed. I had to use Spotlight to locate the “Install Xcode” binary:

After installing Xcode 4.1 I was finally able to configure and make Node.js. Now on to bigger and better things. I hope this helps those who run into the same problem of installing Node.js on OS X Lion.
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