~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (138)

How to Publish ESM-Based npm Packages with TypeScript — Now that you can use the ES modules (almost) everywhere, it’s worth understanding how to package them up for use with npm. Axel digs into everything you need to know and shares some useful tools too.

Human Regex: Human-Friendly Regular Expression Builder with English-Like Syntax — After 8 years of Perl, regexes are my bread and butter, but I’d say most developers aren’t big fans ;-) This library offers a more natural fluent-style option. Magic Regexp and Super Expressive are other options in this space.

Want to Roll Your Own Autoscaling? Here Are Our Secrets 🤫 — Does it make sense for us to write this guide? No! Did we do it anyway? Yes! We did it for you ❤️

Node v20.18.3 (LTS) Released — The main update is the backporting of import attributes and JSON modules is now considered stable.

Troubleshoot Node.js App Performance with Datadog APM — Datadog’s distributed tracing provides end-to-end visibility into requests wherever they go, across hosts, containers, and service boundaries. With rich dashboards, and algorithmic alerts, Datadog provides your team with the tools they need to optimize modern applications.

Node v22.14.0 (LTS) Released — The latest stable/LTS release of Node gets the usual raft of bug fixes and tweaks. Among the more notable ones are TypeScript support for code evalled via stdin, a new --disable-sigusr1 flag, assert.register(), and t.assert.fileSnapshot().

Start Selling to Enterprise Faster with WorkOS — Add SSO, SCIM, and RBAC to your B2B SaaS app in minutes—not months.

Introducing Mentoss: The fetch Mocker — A new approach to mocking global fetch() calls (in both browsers and server-side runtimes) inspired by previous attempts like Nock and MSW.

Standard Schema: A Common Interface to Schema / Validation Libraries — From the creators of Zod, Valibot and ArkType comes a fantastic bit of collaboration to define a common interface to use JavaScript and TypeScript schema libraries.

The Modern Way to Write JavaScript Servers? — The irony is that while Node popularized JavaScript on the server (if we ignore Netscape's attempts in the 90s) this modern, standardized cross-runtime approach doesn’t quite work on bare Node (yet – though you can polyfill it.)

parse-duration 2.0: Convert a Human Readable Duration to Milliseconds — You might wonder why a library that converts 1hr 20mins into 4800000 needs a version 2. Well, it now supports more units (mo, mth, microsec, and nanosec), has moved to ESM, and supports locales.

Node File Trace (NFT): Node Dependency Tracing Utility — A tool to determine exactly which files are necessary for an app to run. Finally, a type of NFT I can actually comprehend!

Feluda: A Tool to Analyze the Licences of Dependencies — It’s a Rust-powered project but one which can be used to process the dependencies of Node, Go, or Rust projects and return a report (or show a TUI interface) on potentially restrictive licenses that apply.

📄 docxtemplater: Generate docx and pptx Documents from Templates — Generate Word and PowerPoint files dynamically by merging against template documents (e.g. invoices, contracts, certificates) It’s open source (MIT/GPLv3) but the creator offers commercial extensions (such as for supporting Excel). GitHub repo and feature demos.

http-status: Another Way to Work with HTTP Status Codes — For example: status[418] returns "I'm a teapot" and status.IM_A_TEAPOT returns 418.

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 Beta: A Big One for Node Developers — It's unusual for a TypeScript beta to be exciting for Node developers in particular, but while TypeScript 5.8 is low on features generally, it's really Node focused with support for require() of ES modules in the nodenext mode, a stable --module node18, and most notably a --erasableSyntaxOnly option for ensuring the use of TypeScript...

🎨 node-canvas 3.1: A Cairo-Backed Canvas Implementation — We recently linked to Skia Canvas, a Skia and GPU-powered canvas drawing API for Node, but node-canvas is the longer standing library and is particularly easy to deploy and use, especially as it no longer has libuv or V8 dependencies.

How I Open-Sourced My Secret Access Tokens from GitHub, Slack, and NPM (and Who Cared) — A developer accidentally published API tokens to npm via a misconfigured CI pipeline. npm and Slack detected and revoked said tokens, though GitHub did not. The author shares his tale and some advice.

Troubles with Multipart Form Data and fetch in Node — One developer’s pain in debugging somethng that ‘should have just worked’ could be your relief if you run into issues where using fetch for multipart/form-data requests simply isn’t working (due to a missing trailing CRLF).

Things People Get Wrong About Electron — A proud maintainer of the wildly successful Electron cross-platform app framework stands by the technical choices made over the years and defends it against some of the more common criticisms here. If an hour of Netflix is 7 gigabytes, what’s 100MB for an app?

Bun 1.2: A Big Step Forward for the Fast JS/TS Runtime — I know it's not Node, but JavaScriptCore based Bun continues to up the server-side runtime game with major strides forward in Node.js compatibility in particular with this release. I often try Node scripts with bun and it Just Works™ – this is a good thing.

A Failed Attempt to Shrink All npm Packages by 5% — What if you could shrink all npm package sizes by 5%.. wouldn’t that benefit all of us? Here’s how one developer did just that using Zopfli compression and then made a proposal to the npm maintainers to implement it. While promising, the proposal was ultimately rejected due to a variety of challenges and...

DBOS Transact v2: Lightweight Durable Execution in TypeScript — An open source library for lightweight durable execution built on Postgres. Durable execution means persisting the execution state of your program while it runs, so if it’s interrupted or crashes, it resumes from where it left off – ideal for long-running or business-critical workflows. Docs.

Is Heroku Still Worth It in 2025? 💸 — You might want to give this guide a read — we took a tour through PaaS alley and found some worthy (💵) alternatives.