I recently started playing around with Node JS, and have been going through TekPub’s BackBone JS tutorials (which uses Node for the backend). Â In the tutorial, Rob uses Webmatrix on Windows8, and I followed along, however, I ran into a problem the first time I tried to run the site using IISExpress and IISNode:

“The iisnode module is unable to start the node.exe process. Make sure the node.exe executable is available at the location specified in the system.webServer/iisnode/@nodeProcessCommandLineelement of web.config. By default node.exe is expected to be installed in %ProgramFiles%\nodejs folder on x86 systems and %ProgramFiles(x86)%\nodejs folder on x64 systems.”

I went into the web.config file, and there is a commented out section for a bunch of different options for IISNode.  One of them is nodeProcessCommandLine, which is the path to node.exe.  On 64 bit systems, this is installed in Program Files, and even though the path was correct, IISNode refused to start.  I did some searching and found this post on StackOverlow, which suggested that there is a current bug in IISNode where it always looks for node in the 32 bit path (Program Files (x86)).  The solution was to go back to Node’s website, and download and install the 32 bit version.  This worked for me, but I was surprised that more people haven’t run into this issue, and the default install from Node is the x64 version.  Hope this helps anyone else that runs into this problem.