A smoother way to ship Node apps
#609 — January 29, 2026
🌊 Improving Single Executable Application Building in Node — First introduced two years ago, Node has a (still experimental) feature to build single executable applications that can be deployed to machines that don’t have Node installed. This week’s Node.js 25.5 release, with its –build-sea flag, moves the final injection step into Node itself, eliminating the need for external tooling and turning what was a multi-step, low-level process into a single command.
Joyee Cheung
Node.js 25.5.0 (Current) Released — The new –build-sea command-line flag is the headline feature (see above). node:sqlite also enables defensive mode by default, and fs.watch gains an ignore option to filter filesystem events.
Antoine du Hamel
Clerk MCP Server for AI Coding Assistants — Your AI assistant hallucinates auth code because it’s working from stale training data. The Clerk MCP server fixes that — connect Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to current SDK docs and get working implementations for middleware, protected routes, organizations, and RBAC.
Clerk sponsor
📊 Node.js 16 to 25 Benchmarked Version-by-Version — It’s interesting to see the jumps in different areas between different versions. The performance for certain tasks took a massive jump up with Node 25 in particular, while other improvements are more gradual.
RepoFlow
IN BRIEF:
Run npx is-my-node-vulnerable right now, suggests NodeSource. It’s a tool, backed by the Node.js project, that checks if your Node.js install is vulnerable to known vulnerabilities.
Want to save yourself between 2ms and 260ms when running npm scripts? The nr tool, a new ‘zero-overhead npm script runner written in Rust’, might be worth a try.
Reddit’s /r/node had a popular thread about if you were starting fresh today, would you still pick Express? “I wouldn’t even choose Node,” said one commenter. Ouch!
🔒 The OpenJS Foundation has shared an annual report covering its efforts in securing the Node.js ecosystem and other OpenJS projects.
Fancy quickly testing your typing speed? Try npx typex-cli
▶ Discussing Node.js in 2026 with Rafael Gonzaga — Node.js TSC member Rafael Gonzaga digs into Node runtime internals, V8-driven performance shifts, benchmarking fallacies, and why many “obvious” speedups can’t ship by default without breaking the ecosystem..
Software Engineering Daily podcast
🔒 Node’s OpenSSL Security Advisory Assessment — The OpenSSL project has released a security advisory including 12 CVEs. The Node.js team concludes that three affect Node in some way, but due to a ‘limited attack surface’, they’ll be addressed in normal, upcoming releases.
The Node.js Team
Build Faster Dashboards with TimescaleDB — 95% compression, continuous aggregates, full Postgres. Query billions of rows instantly. Start for free.
Tiger Data sponsor
📄 Benchmarking Popular Node.js Redis/Valkey Clients – “I benchmarked all major Node.js Redis clients … to see if we should stick with ioredis or if there are benefits to migrating …” Frank Fiegel
📄 Making GitHub Actions Suck a Little Less – With a simple auto-retry workflow to work around transient failures. Jonathan Milgrom
📄 Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare: Serverless Cold Starts Compared Punit Sethi
🛠 Code & Tools
Introducing LibPDF: PDF Parsing and Generation from TypeScript — LibPDF bills itself as ‘the PDF library TypeScript deserves’ and supports parsing, modifying, signing and generating PDFs with a modern API in Node, Bun, and the browser. GitHub repo.
Documenso
🤖 Build an Agent into Any App with the GitHub Copilot SDK — GitHub has released an SDK enabling you to use Copilot’s ‘agentic core’ and workflows directly from your Node apps.
Mario Rodriguez (GitHub)
📋 clipboardy: Access the System Clipboard — A unified API for writing to/reading from the clipboard on numerous operating systems.
Sindre Sorhus
network-default-gateway: Find Your Machine’s Default Gateway — Retrieve the default gateway to which your network device is connected. Works with Node, Deno, and Bun and has OS-specific code to run on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Luca Fornerone
Lodash 4.17.23 – A minor-sounding release for the popular JavaScript utility library, but significant enough to get a full blog post from the OpenJS Foundation due to addressing this CVE.
github-webhook-handler v2.1 – Middleware for receiving and verifying GitHub webhook requests when events occur on your repos.
CMake.js v8.0.0 – Native addon build tool. Think node-gyp but using CMake.
create-dmg v8.0 – Create a good-looking DMG for your macOS app in seconds.
FoalTS 5.2 – TypeScript-based Node.js webapp framework. (Homepage.)
📰 Classifieds
🚀 Auth0 for AI Agents is the complete auth solution for building AI agents more securely. Start building today.
🎉 Hear from the minds shaping the web! Thousands of devs, food trucks & Amsterdam vibes. Don’t miss JSNation — 10% off with JSWEEKLY.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
A roundup of some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:
Bun has had two updates: Bun v1.3.7 was released with an update to JavaScriptCore, leading to 35% faster async/await and ARM64 perf improvements. It also gets native JSON5 and JSONL parsing support. Bun v1.3.8, meanwhile, adds a built-in Markdown parser. While we’re on the topic, Fireship has published ▶️ a video explaining Bun in 100 seconds.
Christopher Chedeau explains how he ported 100k lines of TypeScript to Rust using Claude Code. Some useful insights in nudging agentic tools to get through such mammoth tasks.
If you never got round to watching ▶️ Node.js: The Documentary when it was posted a year ago, it’s still well worth the watch.
