@Cygnus I will give this a try later, after employing common sense and reading the requirements. 1GB is reasonable. Ty

@Bri spot on. it's the bargain bin $5 droplet.

@Bri
@pichalite

I tried both. I cannot run nodebb or run the setup with 1.x.x. I have installed for production. Is this more of an NPM question? I'm guessing it has to do with my nodejs/npm setup. Doesn't seem to be installing packages correctly for nodebb.

:~/nodebb$ npm start
node loader.js
module.js:457
throw err;
^
Error: Cannot find module 'nconf'

edit:
It seems like my NPM install is failing silently; node_modules is empty each time I try. This has absolutely nothing to do with NodeBB. my apologies for wasting your time. Please close or delete.
https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/9884
https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/3867

Yes. It doesn't seem to be installing all of the dependencies for both 0.8.x and 1.x.x. 0.8.x encounters run-time packages that are missing and 1.x.x can't even run the setup script. This could definitely be an NPM issue, but I was hoping to get an answer on which packages are 100% confirmed to work. The official documentation implies the latest of everything which seems to be making it impossible for me to install successfully.

I've ran through 2 or 3 guides for installing NodeBB on Ubuntu 14.04 with MongoDB, and am unable to install NodeBB and get it to run successfully. Is there a recent, up to date, reliable guide on how to install this software on Ubuntu 14.04?

It seems that nodebb doesn't have its dependencies correctly set. Is there is a specific version of NodeBB that will actually install smoothly for 14.04?

some errors:
(runs, but throws errors)
0.8.x
1 Error: Cannot find module 'colors'
2 Error: Cannot find module '../build/Release/lwip_image'

(cannot even run setup)
1.x.x
Could not start: MODULE_NOT_FOUND

https://nodebb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing/os/ubuntu.html
https://www.vultr.com/docs/installing-nodebb-on-ubuntu-14-04