Bookmarks (180)

Node v23.4.0 (Current) Released — There are new --trace-env, --trace-env-js-stack and --trace-env-native-stack options to track environment variable use by a script. Also assert.partialDeepStrictEqual has been added as a way to more quickly assert certain properties are present in an object – you don’t have to supply them all.

8. Announcing AdonisJS v6 — A TypeScript-first backend Web framework with amazing documentation and packed with features out the box. v6 was a huge step forward that moved to using ESM by default and remains the latest major version, despite being released in January.

7. The Node.js Best Practices List: 2024 Edition — An in-depth guide for Node developers that we link to most years. Divided into eight sections and updated regularly, it digs into areas from error handling and code style to Docker and security practices.

6. zx v8.0: Google's Way to Write Shell Scripts with Node — A long standing way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience with Node. zx provides useful wrappers around child_process, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults. v8.0 made zx 20x smaller, faster, makes it easier to kill processes, pass input to commands, and more. It remains the latest major version, with v8.2.4 landing...

5. TypeSpec: A TypeScript-Inspired Way to Define APIs — A language for concisely describing cloud service APIs and generating other API description languages (e.g. OpenAPI), client and service code, docs, etc. v0.63 has just been released, by the way.

3. 10 Modern Node.js Runtime Features to Start Using in 2024 — It's not just Bun and Deno adding new features by the dozen over the past couple of years, there's plenty of new stuff in Node too. How many did you use in 2024?

1. A Guide to Reading and Writing Node.js Streams — I'm not surprised to see this as our most popular link of the year. While streams are a long standing Node feature, they're commonly misunderstood, and Matteo did a good job of covering their benefits, use cases, and more.

The State of Node.js Performance in 2024 — A thorough exploration (and benchmark) of recent performance advancements made in Node.js. The enhancements between Node 18 and 20 up to version 22 might surprise you - it’s clear the team has put a lot of work into this area.

Complete Intro to React v9: New Project, Modern Stack — Join Brian Holt in building a pizza delivery app from scratch. Master hooks, TanStack Router, testing, and React 19 features in this comprehensive guide to modern React development. No prior React experience needed.

Node's Corepack: Version Control for Package Managers — A quick intro to a commonly misunderstood (and mildly contentious) part of the modern Node distribution: Corepack. It’s a (still) experimental tool for managing package managers.

node-qrcode: Generate QR Codes in Node — The ubiquitous 2D barcodes that can store arbitrary data (like URLs).

Pelias 4.0: A Modular, Stand-Alone 'Coarse' Geocoder — Given an address or place name this will come up with geographic coordinates, and vice versa. In terms of finding a location, it’s not super accurate (hence the ‘coarse’) but it may be acceptable for your use case. Demo here.

tldts: Extract Domain Names, Subdomains and Suffixes from URLs — A ‘blazing fast’ library for extracting hostnames, domains, public suffixes, and more from URLs, with full Unicode/IDA support, type definitions, and more.

Undici v7.1.0: Now with Stable HTTP/2 Support — Last week we featured the latest major v7 version of Node’s powerful HTTP/1.1 client. Now, after a little discussion, they’re marking Undici’s HTTP/2 support stable too (notes on HTTP/2 support in the docs).

Build Fully Functional Apps in Minutes, Not Months — Create, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web apps with Bolt.

🖼️ wasm-vips: It's libvips, Compiled to WebAssembly — libvips is a popular, highly efficient image processing library written in C. You can use it via Sharp in Node.js, but this offers a more isomorphic route for use in Node, Deno, and modern browsers by way of WebAssembly. (There's a nifty online demo here.)

Implementing Filtered Semantic Search Using pgvector and JS — If you need something more sophisticated than keyword search, a semantic approach based upon the meanings of words/queries compared using vector embeddings offers a big step up. Luckily, there are some Postgres extensions that make building such things quite simple..

Node.js Delivers First LTS with require(esm) Enabled — It’s a modest milestone, but Node v22.12.0 (LTS) has been released and marks Node’s first LTS release with non-flagged support for loading native ES modules with require(). It’s still experimental, though, and you’re encouraged to send in feedback and bug reports.

Oniguruma-to-ES: Convert Patterns from the Oniguruma Regex Engine to Native JS — Oniguruma is a powerful regex engine used by Ruby, TextMate, and other projects. This could be useful if you need to share regexes between Ruby, TextMate grammars, and JavaScript, say. There’s a demo.

Skia Canvas 2.0: A Browserless Canvas Environment for Node — Based on Google’s Skia graphics engine and offers end results similar to Chrome’s own canvas system. It’s GPU accelerated and can render images, paths, fonts, shapes, and (almost) everything you’d expect. v2.0 adds support for WOFF/WOFF2 fonts, WEBP exporting, and more. GitHub repo.

❤️ Postgres — You need a database provider that loves Postgres as much as you do. We'll take care of all the hassle - monitoring, backups, HA, disaster recovery so you don't have to. Want amazing support? We'll be there when you have questions.

Prisma 6: Better Performance, More Flexibility and Type-Safe SQL — Prisma is a popular, powerful ORM for Node.js and TypeScript apps that takes pride in doing things a little differently to most. You can now use it easily with serverless database platforms like PlanetScale and Neon, as well as in edge function platforms like Cloudflare Workers. D1 and Turso are now supported, and you...

Inside Bluesky’s Engineering Culture — An interesting writeup from May 2024 that’s perhaps become more relevant with Bluesky’s recent rapid ascent. Node.js sits at the heart of the social network’s backend (along with other technologies).

Zero Ops Apache Kafka Replication and Data Mirroring — Moving to WarpStream to reduce your Kafka costs by 80+% and simplify ops is easy with 1:1 replication provided by Orbit.

Undici v7: The Modern HTTP Client Library for Node — A major release for a fundamental Node.js project. This release brings RFC-9111-compliant client-side HTTP caching, stricter fetch() spec compliance, WebSocketStream, and a new way to completely customize the lifecycle of requests.

VineJS 3.0: Form Data Validation Library for Node Apps — A fast validation library for data received by your backend app, providing both runtime and static type safety, and handling form data and JSON payloads. v3.0 has a few breaking changes to be aware of.

Kaluma: A Tiny JS Runtime for the Raspberry Pi Pico — Can a JavaScript runtime squeeze into the 64KB necessary to run on the RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico? Kaluma can, all while offering some Node.js-like niceties.

A Way to Call Node.js Functions from Elixir — Elixir is a Ruby-inspired, Erlang VM-based language and this provides a way for Elixir apps to call Node functions.

png2embeddedjson: Convert PNGs to Base64-Encoded RGB565 in JSON — Niche, but has utility in embedding images directly into apps used on microcontrollers to drive small RGB displays. Both a library and CLI tool.

Crawlee 3.12: Web Scraping and Browser Automation Library — A mature library to handle Web crawling and scraping while appearing ‘human-like’ and supporting multiple switchable backends, such as to support JavaScript rendering on sites that demand it.

DOMPurify 3.2: A Fast, Tolerant XSS Sanitizer for HTML — Supports all modern browsers and is heavily tested, but also works in Node thanks to jsdom. There’s a live demo here.

Deno v. Oracle: Cancelling the JavaScript Trademark — Did you know Oracle formally owns the ‘JavaScript’ trademark? There have been a few efforts to change this over the years (most recently via this open letter) but Oracle isn’t listening. The Deno team has now formally filed a petition to cancel the trademark which Deno claims is fradulent because Oracle used screenshots of Node.js, a...

🔥 0x 5.8: Single-Command Flamegraph Profiling for Node — A tool that can profile and generate an interactive flamegraph for a Node process in a single command.

Better SQLite3 11.6: Fast and Simple SQLite3 Library — We remain big fans of this easy way to get running with vanilla SQLite3 because it just makes everything simpler. It has good docs too. v11.6 bumps us up to SQLite 3.47.1 (which is a bigger release than the version number implies).

🌐 country-to-iso: Convert Country Names and Codes into ISO Codes — Unexciting, but incredibly useful when you’re bombarded by inconsistent country names and you need to use standardized ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 or 3 references (e.g. Germany is DE or DEU, Angola is AO or AGO).

Math.js 14.0: An Extensive Math Library for Node and Browsers — Work with complex numbers, fractions, units, matrices, symbolic computation, etc. A long standing library now, but continuing to get frequent updates. GitHub repo.

Avoiding False Positives in Node.js Tests — Specifically, avoiding loose/unstrict equality checks, overly general assertions, shallow equality, and misunderstandings over what assertions are doing.

Exploring JavaScript Symbols — Symbols were a new ‘quirky little primitive’ (as Trevor puts it) that arrived with ES6 ten years ago, but they continue to be poorly understood. Trevor boils them down really well, including a little side quest into the likely-to-be-deprecated ‘species.’

Node.js 22 Runtime Now Available in AWS Lambda — AWS’s popular serverless platform, which initially launched with only Node.js support, has just turned ten, and this week adds official support for the latest Node LTS release too.

A Complete Introduction to SQLite — Join Brian Holt for this video course and get to grips with the world's most widely-deployed database. You'll create Node.js app with SQLite — learning about queries, table management, optimization, and much more.

Talk to ChatGPT via a Phone Call — It requires some third party services like Twilio, AssemblyAI and, of course, OpenAI’s GPT 4, but you can tie all of these together with Node for a pretty neat demo.

Val Town: A Social Way to Write and Deploy TypeScript — Staying on a serverless-ish theme, “If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun” is a fitting description for this online platform where you write short functions (the so-called ‘val’s) and they get run in V8 isolates. You can connect them together, schedule them, serve them up over HTTP, and more.

AWS Lambda Turns Ten: Looking Back and Looking Ahead — AWS Lambda, Amazon’s cloud function service, essentially launched the term ‘serverless’ and had a big impact on the use of Node.js in the cloud with Node v0.10 being the first and only runtime supported (till Java was added a year later).

⚙️  DBngin: Simple Postgres, MySQL and Redis on Mac and Windows — It’s not Node-specific, but if you’d like to spin up different versions of various common databases using a simple UI, this could fit the bill.

Node-OracleDB 6.7: Oracle's Official Database Driver for Node — I’m not an Oracle Database user myself, but I like the amount of effort Oracle puts into maintaining their Node.js driver. v6.7 adds OpenTelemetry support and settable V$ session attributes.

wacat 1.2: Tests Your Webapp Against 'Cat Chaos' — Uses a virtual ‘cat walking across your keyboard’ approach to tormenting apps with random clicks and form submissions. v1.2 adds LLM integration to detect and handle error states along the way.

SVG To Font 6.1: Read SVG Icons and Output a Font File — Both a CLI tool and Node library that can read in a set of SVG documents and output WOFF2, WOFF, EOT, TTF and SVG fonts. Useful for generating a Web font from a set of icons, perhaps, as in this demo.

Explore Sentry Launch Week: New Products and Community Highlights — Join us for daily video drops on YouTube at 9am PT, and on Discord to chat live with the engineers building Sentry.

npmpackage.info: Detailed Package Info on a Single Page — Give this online tool the name of an npm package and you get a quick ‘dashboard’ style view of the project’s main statistics, covering areas like quality scores, commits, open issues, releases, bundle size, and more.

Node v18.20.5 (LTS) Released — Node v18 remains in its ‘Maintenance LTS’ phase (until May 2025) and while you can’t expect anything big, this release updates a lot of key dependencies and marks import attributes and JSON module support as stable.