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Comment by sacheendra | Hacker News Reader

Why is this even on the first page? This is a Dockerfile. How is this supposed to be of general interest and generate good conversation?

Hope this is not a signal of the future of HackerNews.

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This is worthy of my up vote because I've tried setting up phoenix framework on fresh Ubuntu and it's a pain in the ass

It is?

Most of my problem was with Node.js and not with Erlang or Elixir.

What's your problem with node? I do a lot of Node with Docker so I might be able to help.

Ubuntu doesn't have a convenient apt command for latest node. And there is renaming of the binary from node -> nodejs which breaks things.

There's some not-built-in apt repos to fix it

The problem is that Phoenix requires Node 5 and the current stable (which is what vanilla apt-get will install) is 4. Which is indeed a bit confusing.

Ah I see, why does Phoenix require Node 5?

Phoenix needs NodeJS for the asset pipeline of the frontend.

Yep. Which if we were just creating something without a front-end, then we can ditch the whole node ecosystem.

I generally recommend using nvm [1] to install Node, it's certainly a painless way to get Node 5, then it's also easy to switch version later, or maybe downgrade to the LTS when you're doing 'work work' (`nvm use 4`).

Just remember to set a default, e.g. if you're mostly using Node for Phoenix: `nvm alias default 5`.

It also sets up your global modules directory so that you don't need sudo to install global modules like gulp-cli (should you need any, though it's quite rare that you do nowadays).

[1] https://github.com/creationix/nvm

> Hope this is not a signal of the future of HackerNews.

I hope attitudes like this isn't a signal of the future of Hacker News.

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