Compiling Node.js on Solaris – The Issues

Disclaimer: I’m not a sysadmin, better solutions are welcome.

Earlier today, I was trying to compile node.js on Solaris (x86, 64-bit), get it installed, and setup a simple OHAI server.

And as usual, installing stuffs on Solaris is never straightforward and I ended up encountering several issues. I’m sure these issues (specially the errors) will bite me again in the future, hence I’m blogging this.

First up…

nom> ./configure
/usr/bin/env: No such file or directory

Oh right, I forgot to install python and all of its dependencies. From node.js home page “The build system requires Python 2.4 or better.”

obj/release/mksnapshot obj/release/snapshot.cc --logfile "~/blah/ry-node-29ca7af/build/default/obj/release/snapshot.log" --log-snapshot-positions
ld.so.1: mksnapshot: fatal: libstdc++.so.6: open failed: No such file or directory
scons: *** [obj/release/snapshot.cc] Error -9
scons: building terminated because of errors.
Waf: Leaving directory `~/blah/ry-node-29ca7af/build'
Build failed:  -> task failed (err #2):
        {task: libv8.a SConstruct -> libv8.a}
*** Error code 1

ldd is your friend every time you hit this kind of error.
So I inspected mksnapshot…

nom> ldd obj/release/mksnapshot
        libpthread.so.1 =>       /lib/libpthread.so.1
        libsocket.so.1 =>        /lib/libsocket.so.1
        libnsl.so.1 =>   /lib/libnsl.so.1
        librt.so.1 =>    /lib/librt.so.1
        libstdc++.so.6 =>        (file not found)
        libm.so.2 =>     /lib/libm.so.2
        libgcc_s.so.1 =>         (file not found)
        libc.so.1 =>     /lib/libc.so.1
        libmp.so.2 =>    /lib/libmp.so.2
        libmd.so.1 =>    /lib/libmd.so.1
        libscf.so.1 =>   /lib/libscf.so.1
        libaio.so.1 =>   /lib/libaio.so.1
        libdoor.so.1 =>  /lib/libdoor.so.1
        libuutil.so.1 =>         /lib/libuutil.so.1
        libgen.so.1 =>   /lib/libgen.so.1

Turned out that both libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 were installed in /usr/local/lib but not available from /lib. So I simply created symlinks for /lib/libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 pointing to /usr/local/lib . Another workaround was to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib, but I heard it’s bad.

On to the next one…

ImportError: ld.so.1: python: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/local/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload/_socket.so: symbol inet_aton: referenced symbol not found

This one was just strange, I couldn’t figure out which library dependency was missing, and it took me a while to find out that the python binary I had wasn’t built correctly (some library links were missing from _socket.so) . At the end I used the binary from Sunfreeware which had the correct links.

I got this next error when I accidentally compiled node on a SPARC box, which I believe is not a supported architecture. c-ares only has sunos-x86 header files for Solaris.

../deps/c-ares/ares_expand_string.c:18:24: ares_setup.h: No such file or directory

And another one, on the same SPARC box…

TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'NoneType' objects:

This is a similar issue that stevel mentioned on nodejs Google Group. Basically deps/v8/SConstruct couldn’t figure out the compiler and returns ‘None’ which can’t be concatenated to a String, this line here…

the toolchain to use (' + TOOLCHAIN_GUESS + ')'

After 3-4 hours, I finally got node.js installed, and a simple server up and running on Solaris.

OHAI
KTHXBYE