Setting up Cloud9 on Ubuntu 11.10

Ok, so it’s been a while since I’ve played with the Cloud9 IDE. Joyent are now bundling npm with the Node Windows installer, so I thought it was high time to revisit cloud9.

If you are on windows I highly recommend using VMware Player, it’s free, it’s fast, it has unattended Ubuntu installation and Unity is pure awesome sauce.

There’s a couple of things that have changed since last time around though. NodeJS and NPM are now available as debian packages. So no need to install git, dev tools, curl, etc. Secondly, the versions installed by using the default setup seem to all be compatible. Hence, setting up Cloud9 is decidedly simpler now. Behold!

sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm

npm install cloud9

mkdir NewApp
cd NewApp

~/bin/cloud9 –l 192.168.19.12

This will launch Cloud9 in your NewApp directory. The –l param is optional, although it allows you to access Cloud9 from your Windows host. I didn’t do extensive testing, but editing/debugging works out of the box.

Unfortunately, the version of Cloud9 in the NPM repo seems a bit old (0.5.1 vs 1.9.1 at the time of writing), which includes some pretty impressive features, such as code completion. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll have to use c9.io or let me know in the comments if you’re interested and I’ll investigate further.