My experience with Termux and NodeJS on Android

The first thing I did was install Termux from the play store. Termux provides terminal emulation and a linux environment. Read that I should install updates

$ apt update && apt upgrade

Next I installed nodejs

$ apt install nodejs

Next I needed an editor to create my code files. I decided for an external editor and shared external storage. By default Termux uses app private storage. Shared external storage needs to be setup as follows

$ termux-setup-storage

This creates a $HOME/shared folder in Termux that links to Internal storage in Android file manager. I created a folder called WEB/nodeapp for my project in there. Next I needed a code editor app. For that I chose Quick Edit.

Next was to create my starter node project

$ npm init

I got the following warning message, "npm WARN npm npm does not support Node.js v13.0.0". I fixed this by upgrading npm.

$ npm install -g npm

Next was to create my server.js code and test it.

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function (req, res) {

  res.write('Hello World!');

  res.end();

}).listen(8080);

$ npm install

$ npm start

I got an error, "npm ERR! nodeapp@1.0.0 start: `node server.js` npm ERR! Exit status 1". The error message also listed a log file to check for details but I ran the code directly to see the error.

$ node server.js

I got the following error, "Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::8080". I change the port to 3000 and that fixed it.

This is some exciting stuff to me. Didn't think that so much coding could be done on Android before I switched to a mobile workflow for my blogging. There is an app that can be used to specifically run nodejs code called Dory - node.js that I will look at in future blog post. I like termux because I can setup other coding languages like C++ and Ruby. Share your experiences with us in the comments below.