Since this a Node.js application, Node.js is obviously required to run it. I recommend to use the LTS version of Node.js, which is currently version 18. This is also the version under which this application has been developed and tested. Therefore, using an older version of Node.js may work, but it is not recommended.
If you are on Windows, just download the MSI installer package and install it.
If your Linux distribution does not provide a recent Node.js version (at least version 16 is recommended), you can add an (unofficial) Node.js package repository to your system.
On Debian-based systems create the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodejs.list and give it the following contents:
# Node.js 16.x for Debian 11 (codename bullseye)
deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nodesource.gpg] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_16.x bullseye main
deb-src [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nodesource.gpg] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_16.x bullseye main
Furthermore, the package signing key for that package repository needs to be
imported. You will need wget (or curl) and gpg for that. They should be
installed on most systems, but if they aren't, a simple
apt-get install wget gpg
will take care of that. After that the package signing key can be downloaded and installed with
wget --quiet -O - https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/nodesource.gpg
This downloads the key with wget, converts it into the proper format using
gpg and saves it as /usr/share/keyrings/nodesource.gpg.
Next, run
apt-get update
to update the APT package lists. To install Node.js 16, type
apt-get install nodejs
That's it.
On a RedHat-based system (e.g. CentOS) make sure curl is installed and then type
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | bash -
to download and execute a bash script that will take care of the installation. You might want to check the script code before doing that, though.
The application requires a package for canvas-based rendering. To install that, type
npm install
in the directory export-server/. You only need to do this once. The packages
are then cached in the node_modules/ directory for future use.
Note that this can possibly fail for some operating systems where no
pre-compiled version of the Node.js
canvas package
is available. In that case Node.js attempts to compile the package from source.
However, that requires some additional software, for example a C++ compiler as
well as Cairo and Pango. The documentation of canvas has more information on
how those dependencies can to be installed:
https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/wiki
Basically, it boils down to one of the following commands:
| OS | Command to install dependencies |
|---|---|
| Alpine Linux | apk update && apk add g++ make pkgconf cairo-dev pango-dev |
| Debian | apt-get install build-essential libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev |
| Fedora | yum install yum gcc-c++ cairo-devel pango-devel |
After all dependencies for compilation of canvas are installed, npm install
will succeed.