CentOS 6 Minimal or Hardened Install

The biggest differences you'll see are package manager, and package age.

Configuration files for apache, mysql/postgresql, php, etc are going to be in pretty much the same place, and as easy to find in either distro. There isn't crazy-customization in either ubuntu/debian or CentOS's config files for these things.

What will be different..

Package managers: Ubuntu & Debian use apt-get and dpkg. CentOS/RHEL uses yum and rpm.

Package age: Ubuntu is going to have the newest packages. Risk averse sysadmins often avoid it for that reason.

CentOS/RHEL has older, but very solid packages. Never bleeding edge, but rarely moldy.

Debian is going to have really old packages. Risk averse sysadmins often love it, because it's really, really, stable.

Even if the ubuntu tutorials will be for a different version of a package your using, you should still be able to follow it, just keeping in mind to replace "apt-get install php" with "yum install php", and things like that.

su - 
yum install gcc-c++ openssl-devel
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf node-latest.tar.gz
(cd into extracted folder: ex "cd node-v0.10.3")
./configure
make
make install

Note that this requires Python 2.6+ to use ./configure above. You can modify the "configure" file to point to python2.7 in line 1 if necessary.

To create an RPM package, you can use FPM:

# wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
# tar zxvf node-latest.tar.gz
(cd into extracted folder: ex "cd node-v0.10.3")
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/
# make
# mkdir /tmp/nodejs
# make install DESTDIR=/tmp/nodejs/
# tree -L 3 /tmp/nodejs/
/tmp/nodejs/
└── usr
    ├── bin
    │   ├── node
    │   ├── node-waf
    │   └── npm -> ../lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js
    ├── include
    │   └── node
    ├── lib
    │   ├── dtrace
    │   ├── node
    │   └── node_modules
    └── share
        └── man

Now make the nodejs package:

# fpm -s dir -t rpm -n nodejs -v 0.8.18 -C /tmp/nodejs/ usr/bin usr/lib

Then install and check the version:

# rpm -ivh nodejs-0.8.18-1.x86_64.rpm 
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:nodejs                 ########################################### [100%]

# /usr/bin/node --version
v0.8.18

Source: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki/PackageMakeInstall