docs/contributing/node-versions.md

Node Versions

In development environments this site will run on Node.js versions 12 - 14.

In staging and production environments this site runs on Node.js 14, the Active LTS version from 2020-10-27 to 2021-10-26).

When updating to a new Node.js version, consider the following files:

• The engines.node entry in package.json
• The .node-version file used by nodenv, a tool for managing multiple Node.js versions on your machine.
• The .github/*.workflow Actions files
• The Dockerfile that can be used for deployments
• The contributing/development.md guide
• The contributing/node-versions.md file

nodenv

nodenv is a tool for managing multiple Node.js versions on your local machine. It is not required to run this app, but you may already have it installed if you've worked on other projects that use Node.js.

If you're using macOS, run this command to get the latest:

brew upgrade nodenv node-build

If you see a warning like this one, run the suggested command:

# You should change the ownership of these directories to your user.
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/sbin

If you're using another operating system, or did not use Homebrew to install nodenv, see these upgrade instructions.

To install Node.js 14 and make it your default version, run this command:

nodenv install 14.13.0 && nodenv global 14.13.0

You may sometimes see a warning when running npm scripts with nodenv:

npm WARN lifecycle The node binary used for scripts is [...] but npm is using [...]

This is due to nodenv's overriding behavior. To silence this harmless warning, the nodenv docs recommend running the following command from any directory:

npm config set scripts-prepend-node-path auto