A look back at Node’s 2024

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.

Antoine du Hamel

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.

Frontend Masters

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.

Gonzaga and Parody (NodeSource)

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.

Matteo Collina

2. The Nine Node Pillars — An interesting list of self-proclaimed ‘principles for doing Node.js right in enterprise environments’ written by a group of prolific Node contributors. It acts as a checklist to identify gaps in your current practices, particularly when building larger scale apps.

Snell, Venditto, Dawson, Collina, et al.

4. Introducing Express v5 — We first spied the release of Express.js v5 in September but the official blog post eventually dropped in October and explained the broad plan for Node’s long standing Web framework. v5 remains a ‘bleeding edge‘ release with work still required in areas of security (such as this security audit) and overall processes.

Wes Todd (Express)

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 a few weeks ago.

Google

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.

Yoni Goldberg

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.

Harminder Virk