Bookmarks (169)

NodeBB v4.0.0 Released: Node.js Powered Forums — Now almost 12 years old, NodeBB continues to offer a classic forum experience in a modern Node.js-shaped guise. The big update for v4 is support for federation between NodeBB instances and the wider fediverse generally. Note that the open source project (repo) is GPL licensed with NodeBB Inc providing a hosted service.

file-type 20.0: Detect the File Type of a Buffer, Uint8Array or ArrayBuffer — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG file. Uses a ‘magic number’ approach so is targeted solely at non text-based formats. v20 adds support for yet more formats, including JARs, Word/Excel templates, and now supports ZIP decompression.

Electron 34.0.0 — The JS, HTML and CSS desktop app framework updates to Chromium 132, Node 20.18.1, and adds a way to access the JavaScript call stack of unresponsive renderers.

Protect Against Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

react-nil 2.0: A React 'Null Renderer' — An interesting experiment to use React in situations where you don’t need it to render anything, but you want to use hooks, suspense, context, and other bits of the React lifecycle. Like in, say, a Node app.

ArkType 2.0: Runtime Validation Library — An easy-to-deploy solution for schema validation that can infer TypeScript definitions 1:1 and use them as optimized validators for your data, both at runtime and for immediate type-level feedback in your editor.

Kill Switch Hidden in npm Packages Typosquatting Chalk and Chokidar — Recent research has found several malicious packages ‘typosquatting’ the terminal string styling library Chalk and file-watching library Chokidar — targeting Node devs with security issues.

TypeScript Enums: Use Cases and Alternatives — A look into one of TypeScript’s features that has no direct JavaScript parallel (and hence won’t survive Node’s type stripping approach, though there’s always --experimental-transform-types or tsx).

The January 21, 2025 Security Releases — Not yet released at the time of publication, but coming to you any moment soon, are fresh releases of the Node 23.x, 22.x, 20.x, and 18.x release lines to tackle some as yet undisclosed security issues.

How to Create Your Own AI Agent — Join Scott Moss for this video course exploring how to build an AI agent from scratch — covering LLM options, transformers, token limits, AI memory, function calling, agent loops, prompting, and much more.

PostalMime: Email Parser for Browser Environments — An email parsing library happy in most JS runtimes, including Node. Takes the raw source of emails and parses them into their constituent parts.

Citizen: A Node.js MVC Web Application Framework — Comes with all the usual helpful stuff out of the box: routing, serving, caching, session management, even hot module replacement. It’s currently a lightly updated (though complete) project, but it shows a lot of promise and the author is keen for bug reports and feature requests.

pnpm 10.0: The Alternative, Efficient Package Manager — Long admired for its performance and efficiency improvements over npm, pnpm is now thinking hard about security too with v10 no longer running lifestyle scripts of dependencies by default, improved hashing, and a myriad of other tweaks.

Node Web Audio API 1.0: A Web Audio API Implementation for Node — More accurately, it’s a set of Node bindings for a Rust-powered non-browser implementation of the Web Audio API.

Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal? What Even Is Scaling?! 👀 — Up, down, left, right… A+B, A+B?? No no.. scaling isn’t that complicated. Let’s unpack horizontal vs. vertical scaling.

Node’s New Built-in Support for TypeScript Explained — Node.js v23.6.0 (Current) (above) makes Node’s new type-stripping features work by default. Dr. Axel digs into how it works and what the limitations are. A handy primer.

Node v23.6.0 (Current) Released — In last week’s issue, we said Node 23.6 was imminent, and it came out a few hours later ;-) Along with the usual dependency updates and bug fixes, the big news is type stripping is now enabled by default, enabling that node yourapp.ts magic, described in more detail below..

A New Chapter for Express.js — 2024 saw the still-extremely-popular Express project awaken from a slumber, of sorts, with work being made to update things to modern standards, a security audit, and the release of Express v5. Here, the team explains what’s been going on behind the scenes to get Express back on the tracks, as well as a “bold vision for 2025.”

sqs-consumer 11.3: Build Amazon SQS-Based Apps Without Boilerplate — Build SQS-based (Simple Queue Service) apps without the boilerplate. Just define an async function to handle the SQS message processing. If it’s good enough for the BBC..

Node.js Now Supports TypeScript By Default — It’s been possible to run TypeScript directly with Node.js since v22.6 introduced experimental ‘type stripping’ support, but in the to-be-released-at-any-moment Node 23.6 (or the current Node nightly) you’ll be able to run node yourapp.ts and it’ll Just Work™. Matt provides some details on how it works and what you’ll be able to do.

Tackling the '1 Billion Row Challenge' with Node — The 1 Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) arose about a year ago to see how quickly different languages and techniques can be used to aggregate data from a 1 billion line text file. Here’s what one developer learnt trying to optimize the task with Node.

Node v23.5.0 (Current) Released — A Node release that slipped in just before 2024 ended. WebCryptoAPI’s Ed25519 and X25519 algorithms are now stable and on-thread hooks are now back.

Introducing @smoores/epub: A Package for Working with EPUB Files — EPUB is a popular e-book file format and this new library provides a way to both read and write them. npm package link.

Securing Node.js Express APIs with Clerk and React — A guide that teaches you how to authenticate API requests using ClerkExpressWithAuth() and ClerkExpressRequireAuth() middleware.

zx 8.3: A Tool for Writing Better Shell Scripts — zx is an alternative way to run Node that makes it more useful for shell scripting by offering various niceties like process management, argument handling, and commonly used packages like Chalk. v8.3 makes it possible to iterate over a processes’ output using for await (thanks to Symbol.asyncIterator), plus there are enhancements to using pipes.

Release It 18.0: A CLI Tool to Automate Package Publishing Tasks — Think things like bumping versions, tagging, creating releases at GitHub or GitLab, changelog generation, etc.

MicroDiff 1.5: No Dependency Object and Array Comparison Library — Given two objects or arrays, it returns the differences (think diff but for JavaScript objects). Boasts high performance and TypeScript support. There’s also an article from 2022 about how it works.

jsesc: Get a Stringified, ASCII-Safe Representation of Any Data — Think JSON.stringify() but instead it returns JavaScript meaning it can support things like maps, sets, and BigInts.

CSV Parse: Convert CSV Text into Arrays / Objects — Extends Node’s native transform stream API so you can get up and running quickly – see some example code. Part of a suite of CSV libraries that can also generate and transform CSV more generally.

node-datachannel: libdatachannel Bindings for Node.js — libdatachannel is a standalone C++17-based implementation of various WebRTC standards, as well as WebSockets, for use on POSIX platforms.

Schemalint: A Linter for Postgres Schemas — A linter that lets you raise errors on a variety of common matters like name casing, enforcing row level security, or the presence of mandatory columns (so think more like ESLint than a basic formatter). You can also write your own custom rules.

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.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.

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'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.

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...