#​547 — September 10, 2024

Read on the Web
Together with  WorkOS
Node.js Weekly

Express.js 5.0 Released; Sort Of — After a long period of seeming to merely be on life support, work on Express picked up significantly earlier this year with a big plan to push ‘Express forward.’ The first fruit of this process is now beginning to appear with v5.0. Node 18 is now the minimum support version, there are error handling improvements, improvements to the project’s tooling, the introduction of a Threat Model, and updates to many of its dependencies.

Wesley Todd

💡 We say sort of because there's no official release post yet, and over on the npm registry, 5.0 is still tagged as next, so take that into account when installing it.

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IN BRIEF:

setImmediate() vs setTimeout() — setImmediate is considered deprecated in the browser space, but its different behavior still has a role to play in Node.

Trevor Lasn

Set Up a $4/mo Hetzner VM to Skip the 'Serverless Tax'? — For many use cases, it can be cheaper and more convenient to spin up a cheap server than go serverless.

Shipixen

Integrating Slonik with Express.js — Slonik is a type-safe Node Postgres client that lets you build SQL queries in a composable way.

Gajus Kuizinas

📄 How to Create a Weekly Google Analytics Report That Posts to Slack Paul Scanlon

📄 Securing Node Apps from Supply Chain Attacks Leonardo Zanivan (Auth0)

📄 Implementing Filtered Semantic Search Using pgvector and JavaScript Team Timescale

📄 How to Detect Broken Links with Playwright Stefan Judis (Checkly)

🛠 Code & Tools

Jimp 1.6: Image Processing in Node without Native Dependencies — Most image libraries, such as the powerful Sharp, lean on external libraries to do the heavy lifting, but Jimp can handle BMPs, GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs on its own for blurring, color adjustments, resizing, rotation, etc. GitHub repo.

jimp Contributors

💡 Being pure JavaScript, Jimp can also be used in the browser.

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jsdiff 7.0: A JavaScript Text Diffing Implementation — Can compare strings for differences in various ways including creating patches. There’s an online demo.

Kevin Decker

Rockpack 4.4: An Alternative React App Builder — Akin to Create React App, the goal is to get project setup time as low as possible, but Rockpack holds different opinions around how far to take things and packs in a lot of ideas including server side rendering, linting, and testing. GitHub repo.

Alex Sergey

node-html-to-image 5.0: Generate Images from HTML — Wraps around Puppeteer, but also lets you use Handlebars for added logic in your HTML.

Yvonnick Frin

  • create-fastify 5.0 – Rapidly generate a Fastify project. You don't even need to install it first. You can use npm init fastify app_name_here.

  • file-type 19.5 – Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data. Now with WebVTT support.

  • better-sqlite 11.3 – A neat way to use SQLite from Node. Now with SQLite 3.46.1.

  • Faker 9.0 – Generate large amounts of fake data. Upgrade guide.

  • pnpm 9.10 – The fast, efficiency-focused package manager.

  • ESLint 9.10 – Now with types included.

  • ini 5.0 – npm's INI file parser/serializer.