Node.js 21 released

#​506 — October 17, 2023

Read on the Web

Node.js 21 Now Available — This news is just breaking, but Node v21 (release notes) replaces Node v20 as the ‘current’ release line (basically, the one that gets all the shiny new features first.) This also means Node v20 will soon become the active LTS release. In other news, Node v20.8.1 (Current) and v18.18.2 (LTS) were also released just beforehand to resolve some security vulnerabilities.

OpenJS Foundation

😅 We’ve mentioned some community efforts to create a mascot for Node recently, but the Node project itself has 🐦 unveiled a Node.js mascot design contest on Twitter/X. You have until November 6 to submit your ideas.

Memetria: Secure, Scalable Redis Hosting — High performance Redis hosting with large key tracking, detailed metrics, and a superior uptime record.

Memetria sponsor

Don’t Block the Event Loop (or the Worker Pool) — “If you’re writing anything more complicated than a brief command-line script, reading this should help you write higher-performance, more-secure applications.”

Node.js Project

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: The Barrel File Debacle — Marvin continues his tour through the world of JavaScript performance fixes with a look at how some innocent looking code can make tools run slower than they should. Test runners and many import cycle detection tools are most affected.

Marvin Hagemeister

Building a ‘PDF Chat’ with Node, OpenAI and ModelFusion — In modern AI circles, the idea of being able to use large language models (LLMs) to “chat” with PDFs and similar reference docs is quite popular. This tutorial shows off the basics of creating such a system from reading PDFs with PDF.js, through to tokenization, and building a chat loop.

Lars Grammel

Organizing Multiple Git Identities — A handy way to maintain separate identities for work vs personal use, say.

Garrit Franke

🛠 Code & Tools

Cronicle: Cron with a Web Front End — Describing itself as ‘a fancy cron replacement’, Cronicle is a task scheduler and runner build in Node with a web-based UI.

Joseph Huckaby

PureImage: A Pure JS HTML Canvas 2D for Node.js — If you want a browser-like 2D canvas experience in Node but without any native dependencies, this is for you. You can then save the output to PNG or JPEG. (node-canvas is the long-standing popular choice in this same area but relies upon Cairo as a dependency.)

Josh Marinacci

Introducing Timeline View for Your Temporal Workflows — Learn how to easily visualize Workflows, in your own cluster or in Temporal Cloud, with our new Timeline view.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

eslint-plugin-regexp 2.0: ESLint Plugin for Finding Regex Mistakes — There’s even a neat online demo to show off the sort of things this ESLint plugin will catch.

Yosuke Ota

Awesome SaaS Boilerplates: Boilerplate Apps for Various Stacks — It’s not solely covering Node, but there are plenty of Node-based options on here, as well as for PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Alexey Smirnov

• Electron 27 – The cross-platform desktop app toolkit gains Chromium 118, Node.js 18.17.1, and V8 11.8, but loses macOS 10.13/14 support.

• Tumblr.js 4.0 – An official client library for the popular Tumblr microblogging service. There’s more about the library’s return here.

• better-sqlite3 9.0 – A neat way to use SQLite from Node. The major version bump is due to dropping Node 16 support.

• Postgres.js 3.4 – Full-featured Postgres database client for Node, Deno, Bun and CloudFlare.

• AdminJS 7.3 – Automatic admin interface to add to Node apps.

• Awilix 8.0 – Inversion of Control (IoC) container.

• lowdb 6.1 – Simple to use local JSON database.

• Commander.js 11.1 – Popular CLI app building library.

• Node-OracleDB 6.2 – Node driver for Oracle Database.

• GraphQL Yoga 5.0 – A full-featured GraphQL server.

• stark-db – SQLite-backed, change-tracking database available over HTTP.