June 10, 2026 at 4:23:22 PM UTC

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The newest version of my preferred test runner requires Node 22+ and my package supports Node 18+.

Do I leave it on an old/outdated/insecure version of the test runner? Do I upgrade and stop testing on Node 18 and 20? Do I need to ship a breaking change to bump my package’s Node minimum? Or do I burn the whole suite down and use Node’s built-in test runner?

Breaking changes for devDeps 😭

What would you do?

15 replies

Greg Whitehead 8 min later

@zachleat Not knowing the difficulty of porting your tests to the built-in harness, that’s what I’d look at first. External dependencies are more and more problematic, and it seems crazy to drop support for older versions in production to accommodate a test harness. My 2 cents
Julien W. 14 min later

@zachleat in v18 node's test runner was experimental :/
1. Zach Leatherman 2 hr later
  
  @julienw I don’t mind experimental for a devdep
Thomas Broyer 18 min later

@zachleat Either "upgrade and pray" or bump a major.
Node 18 and 20 are EOL, just stop caring about them.
Or you could migrate to Node's built-in test runner as that's a good choice overall and will save you that question in the future; depends what it costs you.
Andrew Douglass 22 min later

@zachleat using the platform to minimize dependencies is incredibly cool.
cthos 🐱 23 min later

@zachleat 18 and 20 are already EoL so I certainly wouldn't fault a major version bump dropping support for older nodes so that's what I voted for.
My alternative vote (if you don't want to drop support) is rewriting the test suite.
Alex Grant 29 min later

@zachleat
Node:test and bump
You'll find out when you get into it that you have to. It's the right thing to do.
Nathan Bottomley 1 hr later

@zachleat I used AVA for my little podcasting plugin and I really liked it. No advice from me, but I can see why it’s such a difficult decision.
1. Zach Leatherman 2 hr later
  
  @nathanbottomley yeah, I am using ava and ava@8 requires Node 22 😬
Naiyer 2 hr later

@zachleat Been using Node.js builtin test runner for a while and happy with it. If test suite is small, go for it.
kaiserkiwi 11 hr later

@zachleat Well. Node 18 is end of life for a year now. I don't think we need to support these old versions anymore. Everyone should've updated by now.
1. Zach Leatherman 21 hr later
  
  @kaiserkiwi sure, but a major version bump when the library code and library dependencies didn’t change? unnecessary churn!
Illarion Koperski 14 hr later

@zachleat - Breaking change and bump
The versions of the built-in test runner would be (slightly) different for each version of Node
There is a chance you’d have to debug not only your code, but the test runner as well
1. Zach Leatherman 21 hr later
  
  @illarion hmm, I’d expect the userspace test runner to have more maintenance cost than the built-in (though the one I’m using has been very reliable)
Zach Leatherman 1 day later

Love to see all the long-term maintenance-minded folks on this platform!