Ensure client works on Node 14

[j-5-s]

Am i correct that this update to ipns is a breaking change in that you have to be on node 16 and not 14?

when running yarn install on latest you will get:

[2/4] 🚚  Fetching packages...
error peer-id@0.16.0: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=15.0.0". Got "14.18.2"
error Found incompatible module.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install for documentation about this command.

which comes from peer-id

➜  npm ls peer-id
image-cropper@ /Users/jamescharlesworth/projects/jvf/image-cropper
└─┬ web3.storage@3.5.4
  └─┬ ipns@0.16.0
    └── peer-id@0.16.0

[filiptronicek]

I believe this was introduced in #855, upgrading to Node 16 is a good thing, but not possible everywhere: for example, Vercel allows only Node 14 and 12, so you just can't use it after the update.

[filiptronicek]

Maybe this should be rather discussed in https://github.com/libp2p/js-peer-id/, since the release that introduced this is https://github.com/libp2p/js-peer-id/releases/tag/v0.16.0 and the web3.storage team just are keeping their deps up-to-date.

[j-5-s]

Thanks, yeah, i found the issue when trying to deploy to Vercel. Should I close the issue here? Thought it may be good for other users to have visibility here as they may not be looking through issues on other dependencies, just installing web3.storage.

[filiptronicek]

I think it is important to have visibility over the changes, since not even the release notes mention further incompatibility with Node 14 (the release notes for the API - not the client library mention just an upgrade of packages: https://github.com/web3-storage/web3.storage/releases/tag/api-v5.0.6). I would like to see it at least documented well somewhere, since it indeed may be something users discover after deploying to places like Vercel.

/cc @alanshaw

[olizilla]

oof. thanks for flagging this. We're only testing the js client in node 16 currently. I think we'd like it to work in node 14 if there is no huge engineering challenge to doing so.

Noting that Vercel won't support Node 16 until AWS fully supports Node 16, and that might not land for some months yet is a compelling reason for us to do the work to keep Node 14 supported. see: vercel/community#37

Next steps:

• Find a brave human with bandwidth to take this issue on
• Update client CI workflow to test on Node 16 and Node 14 - see: https://github.com/web3-storage/web3.storage/blob/main/.github/workflows/client.yml
• Fix any test failures (the work!)
• Add an engines field to the client package.json and a requirements section in the README to state what platforms we expect this lib to work on.

[olizilla]

Also worth noting that this particular issue in the original description is on an optional extention to the client. If you are not using the new, experimental support for mutablility (see: https://github.com/web3-storage/web3.storage/blob/main/packages/client/README.md#mutability) then the code that currently depends on node16 won't even end up in your final bundle, so it would be safe to ignore that engine warning here, as a workaround in the meantime

see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55419708/yarn-ignore-engines-for-specific-packages