Node Weekly Issue 485: May 9, 2023

#485 — May 9, 2023

Together with

Node v20.1.0 (Current) Released — If you’re still catching your breath after the epic Node 20 release, don’t fear – 20.1 is a more typical bugfix, dependency update, and tweak-style affair.

Michaël Zasso

💡 That said, the fs readdir and opendir functions get a new recursive option which, a commenter notes, could replace some popular third party packages that do the same thing, such as recursive-readdir which gets over 5 million downloads a week(!)

Smooth Logging for Node.js Developers — Unlock the power of logs with AppSignal. Find all the key information in a few clicks in our clean and intuitive interface. Setting up logging and monitoring can be easy, AppSignal is here to show you how.

AppSignal sponsor

A Practical Guide to Not Blocking the Event Loop — Typically, JavaScript engines run JavaScript in a single thread with an event loop. However, the nature of mixing synchronous and asynchronous tasks, along with the increasing popularity of workers for running code on separate threads, makes the landscape harder to navigate than it used to be.

Slava Knyazev

IN BRIEF:

We're going to focus on it more in tomorrow's React Status, but Next.js 13.4 has been released and it pushes hard on the app router approach, the ability to use the filesystem to provide API structure, and a new experimental feature: server actions.
We know it's not Node, but Deno continues to take steps forward with the introduction of Deno KV, a key value store which isn't merely a cloud service (built on top of FoundationDB) but also a local API backed by SQLite. The API is neat.
GitHub's Dependabot has received some tweaks making it less prone to inducing 'alert fatigue' in you when updating npm development dependencies.
Mark Erikson (of Redux fame) wrote a Twitter thread about 🐦 things he has to keep in mind when publishing a library in 2023 – it's a lot. He summarized: "It's a miracle anything about this ecosystem works at all."

GitHub Actions Enforcing Switch from Node 12 to 16 — Node 12 was released in 2019 and is ‘end of life’ so this update is due. As of May 18, the use of Node 16 (which is currently just optional) for running Actions will be enforced so be sure that your workflows are ready.

GitHub Blog

▶ Creating Node Libraries with Rust using Neon: Live — We’ve recently linked to posts on using NAPI-RS for building Rust-powered addons for Node, but Neon offers another approach and you can watch the process live.

Luciano Mammino

▶ Building a Twitter-Like Backend: A Step-by-Step Guide — You’ll need some serious time to get through this (5 hours!) but it covers building a REST API with Express, using Prisma for database interactions, passwordless auth with email, and more.

Vadim Savin

🛠 Code & Tools

Handbrake-JS 7.0: Control Video Encoding and Transcoding from Node — An interface to the popular, open source Handbrake video transcoding tool.

Lloyd Brookes

Node Authorization, Simplified — Follow this step-by-step guide to easily add role-based access control (RBAC) to a React frontend and Node backend.

Aserto sponsor

A Boilerplate and Starter App for Node Serverless Apps — Leans upon Serverless Framework, Express, TypeScript, Prisma, Husky and more to provide a lot of functionality out of the box.

Remi W.

ultramatter: A <1KB Library for Parsing Frontmatter — A dependency-free JavaScript library that parses YAML-based frontmatter on files.

Nate Moore

Notion-to-MD: Convert Notion Pages to Markdown — Supports a lot of special formatting and structure that the popular note-taking system offers.

Souvik Kar Mahapatra

AutoCannon 7.11: A Fast HTTP/1.1 Benchmarking Tool — Inspired by wrk and wrk2 with support for HTTP pipelining.

Matteo Collina

npm-publish 2.1
↳ GitHub Action to publish to NPM.
oclif 3.9
↳ Node.js Open CLI Framework.
Meow 12.0.1
↳ Simple CLI app helper.
Official MongoDB Node.js Driver 5.4
pnpm 8.4 – Efficient package manager.
Electron 24.2
Node MySQL 2 3.3

💻 Jobs

Team Lead Web Development — Experienced with Node, React, and TS? Join us and lead a motivated team of devs and help grow and shape the future of our web app focused on helping millions explore the outdoors.
Komoot

Find Tech Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.
Hired