Another way to look inside your npm packages

#​569 — March 11, 2025

Read on the Web

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

Anthony Fu

Node Added TypeScript Support, But What Does That Mean for Deno? — The Deno team, learning from previous experiences with Node, went ‘all in’ with TypeScript from day one. Now, Node can work with TypeScript too, but the experience is still very different, and the Deno team explains how here.

Andy Jiang and Ryan Dahl

ThePrimeagen’s Dev Setup Is Better Than Yours — See why simpler dev tooling is better by hand-crafting an environment with bash scripts. You’ll learn common Unix tools for managing libraries, interacting with the OS, window management, and more in this course.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Updates on CVE for End-of-Life Versions — Back in January, the Node.js project decided to issue CVEs for end-of-life versions of Node to warn people of the security impacts of using old versions of Node. This didn’t go down well and so the Node project has a new plan going forward.

Rafael Gonzaga

IN BRIEF:

• Alternative JS runtime Bun v1.2.5 has been released with “much better Node-API compatibility.” An ‘almost’ total rewrite of Bun’s Node-API implementation now means more Node-API powered modules will work with Bun.

• A North Korean group of hackers is continuing with its attempts to poison the npm ecosystem with nefarious packages.

• Heroku user? Heroku now has an official VS Code extension for managing your denos and even doing dynos right from the editor.

📄 “Everything I Was Lied to About Node.js Came True with Elixir” – Sometimes we like to check in with people who decided Node wasn’t for them and let’s just say.. Dylan wasn’t a fan. Dylan Moore

📄 How to Troubleshoot Node.js Images in OpenShift Francisco De Melo Junior (Red Hat)

📄 Seven Best Practices of File Uploads with JavaScript StorageBowl

🛠 Code & Tools

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

ElectricSQL / Neon

Electron 35.0: The Cross-Platform Desktop App Toolkit — You can now attach a preload script to Service Workers. Dependencies are also bumped to Chromium 134 and Node 22.14.

Electron Team

Small Teams Need Paas-Ops, Not DevOps — How to skip the complexity and rabbit holes of DevOps, and instead focus on shipping your product fast.

Judoscale sponsor

zx 8.4.0: A Tool for Writing Better Scripts — A minor bump for a package that sweetens the process of using Node for shell scripting tasks. If it’s new to you, these docs will give you the idea.

Google

Systeminformation: A System Information Library for Node — If you want to query what environment your Node program is running in, this is for you. Get info about audio devices, Bluetooth devices, printers, USB, CPU, architecture, wifi, and more.

Sebastian Hildebrandt

• node-mysql2 3.13 – Fast MySQL driver. Now with Cloudflare Workers support.

• Nightwatch.js 3.12 – Node.js end-to-end testing framework.

• pg-promise 11.11 – Postgres interface for Node.js.

• TIFF 6.2 – Pure JS TIFF image decoder.

📢  Elsewhere in JavaScript

A quick roundup of some of other interesting stories in the broader JavaScript landscape, in case you’ve missed them:

• The HTTP Archive released the mammoth ‘JavaScript’ chapter of its latest Web Alamanac. It takes a quantitative look at the use of JavaScript across the modern Web, touching on how much JavaScript most pages use (too much?), tool usage, TypeScript popularity, Web Worker use (higher than you’d think), and more.

• Still not convinced by TypeScript? Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has a ‘sales pitch’ for you. If anyone could convince me, it’s him!

• 🗓️ endoflife.date is a handy, updated source of ‘end-of-life’ dates for hundreds of open source projects, including Angular, Node.js, and Vue. A great resource.

• Dive into WebGPU is a fantastic four part series on using the Web’s most modern graphics API for creating striking visual effects.