Please upgrade Node

💁 show a message to your users to upgrade Node instead of a stacktrace

It's common for new Node users to miss or not understand engines warning when installing a CLI. This package displays a beginner-friendly message if their Node version is below the one expected.

$ node -v
12

$ modern-cli
modern-cli requires at least version 16 of Node, please upgrade

Status

This project is considered feature complete and stable. Only maintenance updates will be published. That said since the goal of the project is to check previous versions of Node, code is unlikely to be modified as it needs to work on very old versions.

Usage

npm install please-upgrade-node

Add please-upgrade-node at the top of your CLI

#!/usr/bin/env node
const pkg = require('./package.json')
require('please-upgrade-node')(pkg) // <- Must run BEFORE requiring any other modules

// ...

Set in your package.json the required Node version

{
  "engines": {
    "node": ">=6"
  }
}

Important: >= is the only operator supported by please-upgrade-node (e.g. >=6, >=6.0, >=6.0.0).

Options

You can set custom exitCode and message function if needed

pleaseUpgradeNode(pkg, {
  exitCode: 0, // Default: 1
  message: function(requiredVersion) {
    return 'Oops this program require Node ' +  requiredVersion
  }
})

Important: to keep message function compatible with older versions of Node, avoid using ES6 features like => or string interpolation.

See also

• xv - ✅ Simple test runner
• husky - 🐕 Git hooks made easy