please-upgrade-node

Please upgrade Node

Be friendly, be cool :sunglasses: show a message to your users to upgrade Node instead of a stacktrace

It's common for new Node users to miss the npm engines warning when installing a CLI. This package displays a beginner-friendly message if their Node version is below the one expected and it's just a few lines of JS code.

Example with hotel CLI:

$ node -v
0.12
$ hotel
hotel requires at least version 4 of Node, please upgrade

Usage

Install:

npm install please-upgrade-node

yarn add please-upgrade-node

Require please-upgrade-node before anything else:

// bin.js
require('please-upgrade-node')(
  require('./package.json')
)

// The rest of your code...

In your package.json, define the required Node version:

{ 
  "name": "super-cli",
  "bin": "./bin.js",
  "engines": { "node": ">=6" }
}

Please note that >= is the only operator supported by please-upgrade-node (e.g. >=4, >=4.0, >=4.0.0). Now if your users install your super-cli project with an older Node version, they'll see:

$ npm install -g super-cli
# [...]
npm WARN engine super-cli@1.0.0: : wanted: {"node":">=6"} (current: {"node":"4.8.3","npm":"2.15.11"})
# [...]

$ super-cli
super-cli requires at least version 6 of Node, please upgrade

Caveat

Make sure when requiring please-upgrade-node to not use syntax that is only supported in recent versions of Node.

For example, if you use const instead of var and don't transpile it, please-upgrade-node won't work with Node 0.12:

const pkg = require('./package.json') // ← Will fail and exit here with Node 0.12,
                                      // because const isn't supported.
require('please-upgrade-node')(pkg)   // No upgrade message will be displayed :(

See also

• pkg-ok - :ok_hand: Prevents publishing a module with bad paths
• husky - :dog: Git hooks made easy

Thanks to zeit/serve for inspiring the error message.

License

MIT - Typicode :cactus: - Patreon