Runtime

A runtime environment is where your code scripts are executed and dependencies are installed. You should limit yourself to a single runtime to reduce the complexity of setting up your development environment.

Solution: Node.js

Node.js is the most popular runtime for frontend development. It is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine that allows you to run JavaScript code outside of a browser.

Key selling points

Node.js is a free, open source, cross-platform well maintained runtime

You can create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts in JavaScript

It is natively integrated with package managers to manage your dependencies

Install and manage your Node.js version

I recommend using Node Version Manager (nvm) to install and manage your local Node.js version. You can install it following the instructions on the nvm GitHub repository.

To download, compile, and install the latest release of Node.js:

nvm install node # "node" is an alias for the latest version

To install the latest LTS version of Node.js:

nvm install --lts

To install and use a specific version of Node.js:

nvm install 22.13.1

Node.js versioning

For production applications, you should use active LTS releases, which are even-numbered releases (22, 24, etc.).

LTS release status is “long-term support”, which typically guarantees that critical bugs will be fixed for a total of 30 months.

You can find Node.js release schedule here.

Specifying the Node.js version in your project

I recommend specifying the Node.js version in your project’s package.json file. This will ensure that the correct version of Node.js is used when installing and running your project both locally, in CI/CD pipelines as well as hosted environments:

{
  ...
  "engines": {
    "node": "22.x"
  }
}

I do not recommend using a .nvmrc file to specify your Node.js version, simply because you should always prefer a single source of truth and the engines field in your package.json has wider support.