This release deliberately contains backwards-incompatible changes. To avoid automatically picking up releases like this, you should either be pinning the exact version of esbuild in your package.json file (recommended) or be using a version range syntax that only accepts patch upgrades such as ^0.21.0 or ~0.21.0. See npm's documentation about semver for more information.

• Omit packages from bundles by default when targeting node (#1874, #2830, #2846, #2915, #3145, #3294, #3323, #3582, #3809, #3815)

  This breaking change is an experiment. People are commonly confused when using esbuild to bundle code for node (i.e. for --platform=node) because some packages may not be intended for bundlers, and may use node-specific features that don't work with a bundler. Even though esbuild's "getting started" instructions say to use --packages=external to work around this problem, many people don't read the documentation and don't do this, and are then confused when it doesn't work. So arguably this is a bad default behavior for esbuild to have if people keep tripping over this.

  With this release, esbuild will now omit packages from the bundle by default when the platform is node (i.e. the previous behavior of --packages=external is now the default in this case). Note that your dependencies must now be present on the file system when your bundle is run. If you don't want this behavior, you can do --packages=bundle to allow packages to be included in the bundle (i.e. the previous default behavior). Note that --packages=bundle doesn't mean all packages are bundled, just that packages are allowed to be bundled. You can still exclude individual packages from the bundle using --external: even when --packages=bundle is present.

  The --packages= setting considers all import paths that "look like" package imports in the original source code to be package imports. Specifically import paths that don't start with a path segment of / or . or .. are considered to be package imports. The only two exceptions to this rule are subpath imports (which start with a # character) and TypeScript path remappings via paths and/or baseUrl in tsconfig.json (which are applied first).

• Drop support for older platforms (#3802)

  This release drops support for the following operating systems:

  • Windows 7
  • Windows 8
  • Windows Server 2008
  • Windows Server 2012

  This is because the Go programming language dropped support for these operating system versions in Go 1.21, and this release updates esbuild from Go 1.20 to Go 1.22.

  Note that this only affects the binary esbuild executables that are published to the esbuild npm package. It's still possible to compile esbuild's source code for these older operating systems. If you need to, you can compile esbuild for yourself using an older version of the Go compiler (before Go version 1.21). That might look something like this:

  git clone https://github.com/evanw/esbuild.git
  cd esbuild
  go build ./cmd/esbuild
  ./esbuild.exe --version
  

  In addition, this release increases the minimum required node version for esbuild's JavaScript API from node 12 to node 18. Node 18 is the oldest version of node that is still being supported (see node's release schedule for more information). This increase is because of an incompatibility between the JavaScript that the Go compiler generates for the esbuild-wasm package and versions of node before node 17.4 (specifically the crypto.getRandomValues function).

• Update await using behavior to match TypeScript

  TypeScript 5.5 subtly changes the way await using behaves. This release updates esbuild to match these changes in TypeScript. You can read more about these changes in microsoft/TypeScript#58624.

• Allow es2024 as a target environment

  The ECMAScript 2024 specification was just approved, so it has been added to esbuild as a possible compilation target. You can read more about the features that it adds here: https://2ality.com/2024/06/ecmascript-2024.html. The only addition that's relevant for esbuild is the regular expression /v flag. With --target=es2024, regular expressions that use the /v flag will now be passed through untransformed instead of being transformed into a call to new RegExp.

• Publish binaries for OpenBSD on 64-bit ARM (#3665, #3674)

  With this release, you should now be able to install the esbuild npm package in OpenBSD on 64-bit ARM, such as on an Apple device with an M1 chip.

  This was contributed by @ikmckenz.

• Publish binaries for WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) preview 1 (#3300, #3779)

  The upcoming WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) standard is going to be a way to run WebAssembly outside of a JavaScript host environment. In this scenario you only need a .wasm file without any supporting JavaScript code. Instead of JavaScript providing the APIs for the host environment, the WASI standard specifies a "system interface" that WebAssembly code can access directly (e.g. for file system access).

  Development versions of the WASI specification are being released using preview numbers. The people behind WASI are currently working on preview 2 but the Go compiler has released support for preview 1, which from what I understand is now considered an unsupported legacy release. However, some people have requested that esbuild publish binary executables that support WASI preview 1 so they can experiment with them.

  This release publishes esbuild precompiled for WASI preview 1 to the @esbuild/wasi-preview1 package on npm (specifically the file @esbuild/wasi-preview1/esbuild.wasm). This binary executable has not been tested and won't be officially supported, as it's for an old preview release of a specification that has since moved in another direction. If it works for you, great! If not, then you'll likely have to wait for the ecosystem to evolve before using esbuild with WASI. For example, it sounds like perhaps WASI preview 1 doesn't include support for opening network sockets so esbuild's local development server is unlikely to work with WASI preview 1.

• Warn about onResolve plugins not setting a path (#3790)

  Plugins that return values from onResolve without resolving the path (i.e. without setting either path or external: true) will now cause a warning. This is because esbuild only uses return values from onResolve if it successfully resolves the path, and it's not good for invalid input to be silently ignored.

• Add a new Go API for running the CLI with plugins (#3539)

  With esbuild's Go API, you can now call cli.RunWithPlugins(args, plugins) to pass an array of esbuild plugins to be used during the build process. This allows you to create a CLI that behaves similarly to esbuild's CLI but with additional Go plugins enabled.

  This was contributed by @edewit.