We are currently running all our servers on Node 18.16, a version released in April 2023.

2024-10-29 (next Tuesday) marks the day when Node 22 goes into Active LTS.

New features

Going from 18.16 to (e.g.) 22.10 gives us the following new features:

• (v20) Support for immutable Array.toReversed(), .toSorted(), etc. operations
• (v20) A Node-inbuilt test runner
• (v21) Support for Object.groupBy() and Map.groupBy()
• (v22) Set methods like Set.union(), Set.intersection()
• (v22) Watch mode (node --watch)
• (v22) Inbuilt glob and globSync
• Performance improvements
• (v22.7) More compatible RequireJS/ESM module loading (Module syntax detection)
• (v22.6) Experimental TypeScript type stripping

Compatibility

I have silently run my local dev setup on Node 22.x for quite a while and haven't noticed any compatibility issues. The only issue I noticed is that we're getting this deprecation warning a bunch of times:

(node:90744) [DEP0040] DeprecationWarning: The `punycode` module is deprecated. Please use a userland alternative instead.
(Use `node --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)

We can most likely fix this one by upgrading/fixing the version of whatwg-url in our dependencies.

Steps

• Update our server setup scripts in https://github.com/owid/ops to install Node 22
• Ensure that new staging servers run on Node 22
• Update prod servers to Node 22
• Switch to using Corepack (corepack enable) rather than installing yarn manually?
• ...?