Automating the desktop with Node

#​471 — January 26, 2023

Read on the Web

Nut.js 3.0: Use Node for Desktop Automation — Take control of your desktop environment (Windows, macOS or Linux) from code with control over keyboard and pointer, plus you get some image matching possibilities too. Open source but with optional sponsor-only extension packages. GitHub repo and what’s new in v3.0.

Simon Hofmann

Building Reliable Distributed Systems in Node — This post introduces the concept of durable execution which is used by a variety of companies and services to run reliable distributed systems. Temporal is a platform that coordinates workflows and durable jobs built around them.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw

Memetria: Secure, Scalable, Full-Featured Redis 7 Hosting — The latest Redis features, instrumented and scaled with the tools teams need as they grow.

Memetria sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• Node v19.5.0 (Current) has been released, though with few changes of note. Lots of little tweaks, fixes, and dependency updates.

• Deno 1.30 has been released with first-class support for built-in Node.js modules (e.g.

  1

  fs

  or

  1

  process

  ).

Unlocking Security Updates for Transitive Dependencies with npm — Dependabot is a GitHub-based service that issues pull requests updating known vulnerable direct dependencies on projects. But what about transitive dependencies? If you’re using npm, that’s possible too (since September last year). This post digs more into how it works.

Bryan Dragon (GitHub)

First Beta of Eleventy v2.0 Released — Eleventy is a popular Node-powered static site generator (and now sponsored full-time by Vercel) and v2.0 includes enough major changes that a thorough beta stage is needed. Zach ▶️ speaks more about this release here.

Zach Leatherman

Observability Made Affordable

TelemetryHub by Scout sponsor

Packaging Rust Apps for the npm Registry — Isn’t npm just for Node or JavaScript stuff? Surprisingly not. Node is required to make this technique work, but as long as you can package and execute a binary, you’re good to go.

Orhun Parmaksız

You Might Not Need An ORM — Where the author moves away from Prisma.

Some Tech Blog

🛠 Code & Tools

Opossum 7.1: A Circuit Breaker for Async Functions — You can do things like trigger a failure after a certain timeout, fail entirely if a certain error threshold is reached, etc. GitHub repo.

Red Hat

s3fs: Drop-In AWS S3 Backed

Replacement — Supports methods like

/

,

/

,

,

, etc. but working upon S3 rather than the local file system.

Cyclic

Tuple, a Lightning-Fast Pairing Tool Built for Remote Developers — High-resolution, crystal-clear screen sharing, low-latency remote control, and less CPU usage than you’d think possible.

Tuple sponsor

Jazzer.js: Coverage-Guided, In-Process Fuzzing for Node — Instrumentation-powered mutation for the JavaScript ecosystem by way of libFuzzer. This week’s v1.2 release adds support for libFuzzer’s fork mode.

Code Intelligence

Modern Errors: Handle Errors in a Simple, Stable, Consistent Way — Create error classes, wrap or aggregate errors, or use one of several plugins to do things like print bug reporting info, print stack traces, or more. Happy in both Node and the browser.

ehmicky

Mock Service Worker 1.0: API Mocking Library for Browser and Node — Intercepts requests which you can then mock. Capture outgoing requests using an Express-like routing syntax, complete with parameters, wildcards, and regexes. GitHub repo.

Artem Zakharchenko

• Mongoose 6.9
  ↳ MongoDB object data modeling.

• Haraka 3.0.1
  ↳ Extensible SMTP / email server.

• Nave 3.5
  ↳ Virtual environments for Node.

• Rimraf 4.1.2
  ↳ Elaborate

  1

  rm -rf

  from Node.

• Fastify 4.12
  ↳ Fast, low overhead web framework.

• Strapi 4.6
  ↳ Headless Node.js-powered CMS.

• Node-Redis 4.6
  ↳ Redis client library.

• Node USB 2.7
  ↳ Improved USB library for Node.

🕰 ICYMI (Some older stuff that may catch your eye…)

• Manually installing different versions of Node? Max Rozen says there’s a much better way. Well, four ways, even.
• Florian Rappl looks at how to build a secure API gateway atop Express.
• James Walker shares an introduction to

  1	worker_threads

  for doing some multithreading.

• Ariel Weinberger highlights four common mistakes Node developers make.