How To Install Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Reveal.js is an open-source HTML presentation framework. It’s a tool that enables anyone with a web browser to create fully-featured and beautiful presentations for free. It is built on open web technologies. It has a rich set of features including, Markdown content, nested slides, PDF export, and JavaScript APIs for controlling the slide navigation.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install curl gnupg2 unzip git

Step 2. Installing Node.js.

Run the following command add the Node.js repository to your system:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo bash -

Next, install Node.js by running the following command below:

sudo apt install nodejs

You can check the installed version by running the following command:

node -v

Step 3. Installing Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the latest version of Reveal.js from the Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js.git

Once the download is completed, change the directory to reveal.js and install all dependencies:

cd reveal.js
sudo npm install
npm start

You can also change this port by using the --port:

npm start -- --port=7337

After that, you can create a new system service to manage reveal:

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/reveal.service

Add the following line:

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
Restart=on-failure
WorkingDirectory=/home/unixcop/reveal.js
ExecStart=npm start

Save and close the file then reload the systemd service with the following command:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start reveal
sudo systemctl enable reveal

Step 4. Accessing Reveal.js Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and go to http://your-server-ip-address:8000

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Reveal.js. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Reveal.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Reveal.js website.