Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

An old version of Node.js is available in official repo for Debian Sid(unstable).

To build a package and install it on Debian (as root):

apt-get install python g++ make checkinstall
mkdir ~/src && cd $_
wget -N http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf node-latest.tar.gz && cd node-v*
./configure
checkinstall #(remove the "v" in front of the version number in the dialog)
dpkg -i node_*

To uninstall:

dpkg -r node