Run application on specific node version

Question

Is it possible to force my application to run under some specific or upper node version? I found my app may have error if some environment has older node.

I'm wondering if I can set it in package.json. And if there's anything go wrong, it can log a related message to the terminal.

Answer 1

You can use Node Version Manager for this: https://github.com/creationix/nvm

After installing NVM, you can install as many different versions of Node as you want, and can select which one to run a given app under.

If you want your application to only run with a given version, you can check the version with: process.versions.node and compare against that. For instance, put this at the beginning of app.js (or whatever your initial file is):

// Using package semver for clarity
var semver = require('semver');
if (!semver.satisfies(process.versions.node, '>0.11.0')) {
    console.log('Incorrect Node version');
    process.exit();
}

(The following is for npm packages only)

After testing different versions, you can specify what versions of Node your package is compatible with in package.json with the engines parameter. The following claims to work with all versions equal to or greater than 0.6.0:

 "engines": {
     "node": ">=0.6"
 }

It should be noted that this does not actually force the user to use >=0.6, but will give an error if someone tries to npm install your package. If you want to force a version, you can add "engineStrict": true.