Ivy the idea of a portable environment taken to the extreme. Each ivy instance has it's copy of node and all your libraries. The node version and bundled libraries are controlled via git submodules.
It's super easy to install with a single line. If you have wget then do:
wget -O- http://github.com/creationix/ivy/raw/master/utils/setup.sh | sh
For curl do:
curl -# http://github.com/creationix/ivy/raw/master/utils/setup.sh | sh
And then after either case, you can start up ivy right away:
./ivy/bin/node
Try require('connect') to make sure the bundled libraries are available.
If you add /ivy/bin to your executable path then it's "installed". That's all it takes!
Installing new modules, updating existing modules, and changing node versions is all done via the git submodules in /modules/* and /ivy-bin. Currently there are no utilities to automate this, but there are plans to integrate NPM somehow to play nice with the Ivy environment.
Currently I bundle two platforms of node.
- node-osx - This is built on OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in 64-bit mode
- node-linux - This is built on latest Ubuntu in 32-bit mode.
I may add more platforms as time goes, but these are the two I use for development and production.