nodejs-simple-downloader

This is a tool that simply downloads the desired version of Node.js and unpacks it.

⚠️   Node.JS Apple Silicon support — Due to the lack of official binaries for darwin-arm64 (Apple Silicon) architectures for Node.JS versions before 16.0.0, this tool does not support downloading any darwin-arm64 binaries. Instead, it will download the binaries for the darwin-x64 (Intel Macs) architecture regardless of if the requested version supports Apple Silicon.

FAQ

Why?

Although there are existing solutions like nvm, n, nodenv and potentially more, all these solutions focus on installing nodejs globally and making it available in the shell environment. In contrast what node-simple-downloader does is simply downloading and extracting the desired Node.js version to a specified directory. How the downloaded Node.js version is then used is totally up to the user.

The use-case that triggered the creation of this tool is that all our nodejs applications specify themselves which version of Node.js they need. This allows app developers to take care of maintaining the local Node.js installation without involvement of system operators.

Are there more details on how the above mentioned setup looks like?

Not yet. We are currently only planing on migrating away from researchgate/nodejs-installer and haven't finalized how it will work in the end. Once this is done we will share more details.

Okay, but why golang?

I always wanted to learn go and the scope of this tool seemed doable for someone who hasn't worked with go before. So bear in mind that the code is probably not structured and written in the best way possible. If you have suggestions feel free to open PRs. I'm happy to learn how it can be done better.

The other decision to go with go is that having a single executable without a requirement for a runtime, interpreter or package manager should make the setup easier in the end.

Usage

Node.js

With specific version

nsd nodejs /path/ --version 12.15.0

With specific version from file

package.json (exact version in engines field) and .nvmrc are currently supported.

nsd nodejs /path/ --version-from-file ./.nvmrc

Yarn (Currently only v1 supported)

Full distribution

nsd yarn /path/ --version 1.22.5

Single file distribution

This will download the single javascript file and move it into the download directory with the name supplied to --single-file

nsd yarn /path/ --version 1.22.5 --single-file yarn

With specific version from file

package.json (exact version in engines field) is currently supported.

nsd nodejs /path/ --version-from-file ./package.json

How to build

Requires go version 1.15 or newer

• Checkout project
• Run go mod tidy
• Run cd nsd && go build

How to run tests

cd nsd && go test ./...