Install latest nodejs (4.2.1 or 5.0) on centos 7 using yum

I followed the instructions from Install Apache/PHP 5.4.10 on Fedora 17/16, CentOS/RHEL 6.3/5.8 with a slight modification. It took maybe 10min. My exact commands are shown below. Note that the first command had to be changed from what is shown in the article. The change was from epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm to epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm.

1. How to add a repo that provides PHP 5.4 into yum?

   yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
   yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm
   

2. Can this seamlessly replace the current PHP version in CentOS? For me the following commands worked and none of my existing PHP web pages broke. Your mileage may vary.

   yum --enablerepo=remi install httpd php php-common
   yum --enablerepo=remi install php-pecl-apc php-cli php-pear php-pdo php-mysql php-pgsql php-pecl-mongo php-sqlite php-pecl-memcache php-pecl-memcached php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml
   service httpd restart
   

3. How can I switch back to the official repo when it supports PHP5.4? I have not tested the commands to remove and re-install PHP from CentOS repositories, but these should work.

   # Remove the Remi packages. Note the reversed command order
   yum remove php-pecl-apc php-cli php-pear php-pdo php-mysql php-pgsql php-pecl-mongo php-sqlite php-pecl-memcache php-pecl-memcached php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml
   yum  remove httpd php php-common
   # Install the CentOS packages. 
   yum install httpd php php-common
   yum install php-pecl-apc php-cli php-pear php-pdo php-mysql php-pgsql php-pecl-mongo php-sqlite php-pecl-memcache php-pecl-memcached php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml
   

4. Will there be any potential to break PHP modules I [sic] currently using? Yes. Using a recent version of CentOS (6.2?) with Zend installed using the Zend installer, the above upgrade broke Zend.

All the above commands were run as root. Best practice is to login as a non-privileged user and use sudo. (This is a development VM with a current snapshot...)

Also, do NOT enable the Remi repository by default - in the past I got clever and enabled it by default and things broke, even with repository priority.

I just re-checked this. Both nodejs and npm and all dependencies for both have been added to epel 7. I just installed both on my CentOS 7 box. You should be able to do:

yum -y install nodejs npm

The -y flag will automatically answer "yes" to every confirmation question, so leave it out if you want to be able to say no to something.