openedx / browserslist-config Goto Github PK

Abstract
Node 16's support will end on September 11, 2023. So we have to upgrade node JS to v18 before that.

Extras
Project should use .nvmrc to have a consistent node version
We have to update Readme accordingly.

Upgrade Node JS from 16 to 18

Without specifying a node version (that is, by having an implicit dependency on whatever node version openedx is currently building on), we can easily break builds by using new JS features that came out after the node we use (currently 12, soon to be 16).

For example, we could use some fancy new JS feature that babel provides a polyfill for via the '2 last firefox' line. But then firefox gains support for it and babel stops polyfilling it. Then our CI tests suddenly and curiously break because node16 never supported it and chokes on the new syntax.

Let's make our node reliance explicit!

This sounds like it could maybe be a one-liner, like adding current node to our list. But this was attempted before and then reverted because it broke our builds.

I don't know the specific error that occurred, but I do know that webpack will error out if you don't also set webpack.target = 'web' because webpack can no longer infer that. Maybe other tooling would get also surprised by the addition of a node version in the browserslist.

So this ticket is to keep track of the need in general for adding node versions to the browserslist and maybe collect the work items that we'd need to fix when we do make this change.

The only one I know of now is also adding target = 'web' to frontend-build. But there ought to be some discovery work to suss out if that's it or there is more work needed.