To npm, or not to (include) npm?

#​521 — February 20, 2024

Read on the Web

Apologies if you noticed there was no Node Weekly last week. This was intentional, but I forgot to mention it in advance. It’s the usual weekly service now until Easter, at least.. 🙂
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Node Community Debates Enabling Corepack by Default — Node developers are wrestling with the decision to enable Corepack (a tool for managing package managers) by default, which has sparked a debate about the possibility of even removing

from the Node.js binary. (Unlikely IMO, but hey.)

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

Dax: Cross-Platform Shell Tools for Node — If it seems similar to Google’s zx, it is, but because it uses a cross-platform shell with common built-in cross-platform commands, more code will work across different OSes. Dax was originally written for Deno (which now has its own, native shell scripting functionality) but now supports Node too.

David Sherret

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

Memetria sponsor

How to Set Up a Basic Node Server App with TypeScript in 2024 — Popular dev educator Jason has put together a quick tutorial on how to set up a Node project in 2024, including TypeScript, live reloading, and loading in environment variables from

.

Jason Lengstorf

💕 The Node.js Valentine’s Day Security Releases — Security releases had been expected to land some time in the past two weeks and they finally landed as a Valentine’s Day present in the shape of v21.6.2 (Current), v20.11.1 (LTS), and v18.19.1 (LTS). They include fixes for a variety of vulnerabilities, including a few high severity ones in areas like HTTP-based DoS attacks and privilege escalation.

Rafael Gonzaga and Marco Ippolito

IN BRIEF:

• 🎬 Tomorrow, Honeypot is going to release a documentary about Node.js – you can ▶️ watch the trailer here. To get a deeper feel for what it might be like, you might enjoy their recently popular ▶️ Ruby on Rails documentary.

• Amazon has revealed LLRT, a new ‘low latency’ server-side runtime (Low Latency RunTime, in fact). Its focus is on rapid startup times, particularly for ephemeral use cases like serverless/edge. It’s built atop QuickJS.

• The npm team at GitHub has written about how using GitHub Codespaces has substantially reduced the friction of its development loop and boosted productivity.

• Some discussion has reignited over the future of Express.js, as well as ▶️ a recorded meeting. Early days. Fingers crossed.

Creating Your Own Vector Search in 5 Minutes with SQLite & Node — sqlite-vss is a SQLite extension that adds basic vector storage and querying capabilities to SQLite, and you can combine it with Node and OpenAI embeddings to create your own natural language vector based search system reasonably quickly.

Markus Oberlehner

Saga Pattern Made Easy — Sagas are a common development blueprint, but they can be difficult to build, test, and maintain–learn how we can help.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

The Best Way to Get NVM Working in CI/CD Systems

Tomasz Gągor

🛠 Code & Tools

DashPress: Generate Versatile, Simple Admin Apps Quickly — Formerly known as Hadmean, this no-code admin app generator built atop Node and Next.js is easy to get started with. Just run:

. If you want to see what the result is like, there’s a live demo which feels fast. (Note: AGPL 3.0 licensed.)

Ayobami Akingbade

yamlify-object 2.0: Stringify Objects with YAML Syntax — Take an object / array and turn it into a YAML string (which you can colorize with yamlify-object-colors if you want to use it for debugging purposes at the console.) js-yaml is another popular option in this space (that can parse YAML, too) but hasn’t had a release in three years.

Eugeny Dementev

node-libcurl 4.0:

Bindings for Node — libcurl is a very powerful and established way to fetch data from URLs across numerous protocols (HTTP, IMAP, SCP, SFTP, LDAP, Gopher..)

Jonathan Cardoso Machado

Directus 10.9: Wrap a Database with a GraphQL & REST API — A Node.js-powered system that acts as a frontend to a Postgres, SQLite, MySQL, Oracle, or other SQL database, providing a modern dashboard, client, and REST and GraphQL APIs. Here’s what’s new in version 10.9. (Note the BSL license which limits free use to below a certain revenue level, but then reverts to GPL after some time.)

Monospace, Inc.

• Umzug 3.7 – Framework agnostic migration tool that provides a clean API for running and rolling back tasks.

• Tedious 17.0 – TDS module for connecting to Microsoft SQL Server.

• Chai 5.1 – BDD / TDD assertion framework.

• Mocha 10.3 – Test framework for Node & browser.

• Mineflayer 4.19 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.

• node-ble 1.10.0 – Bluetooth Low Energy library.

• Pino 8.19 – Fast JSON-powered logging.