The Node.js Update #41; 12 October, 2018

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Node.js Collection

3 min readOct 12, 2018

Below you can find RisingStack’s collection of the most important Node.js updates, tutorials & announcements from this week.

Node.js v10.12.0 (Current) Released. Changes:

assert: The diff output is now a tiny bit improved by sorting object properties when inspecting the values that are compared with each other.
cli:
The options parser now normalizes _ to - in all multi-word command-line flags, e.g. --no_warnings has the same effect as --no-warnings.
Added bash completion for the node binary. To generate a bash completion script, run node --completion-bash. The output can be saved to a file which can be sourced to enable completion.
crypto:
Added support for PEM-level encryption.
Added an API asymmetric key pair generation. The new methods crypto.generateKeyPair and crypto.generateKeyPairSync can be used to generate public and private key pairs. The API supports RSA, DSA and EC and a variety of key encodings (both PEM and DER).
fs: Added a recursive option to fs.mkdir and fs.mkdirSync. If this option is set to true, non-existing parent folders will be automatically created.
http2:
Added a 'ping' event to Http2Session that is emitted whenever a non-ack PING is received.
Added support for the ORIGIN frame.
Updated nghttp2 to 1.34.0. This adds RFC 8441 extended connect protocol support to allow use of WebSockets over HTTP/2.
module: Added module.createRequireFromPath(filename). This new method can be used to create a custom require function that will resolve modules relative to the filename path.
process: Added a 'multipleResolves' process event that is emitted whenever a Promise is attempted to be resolved multiple times, e.g. if the resolve and reject functions are both called in a Promise executor.
url: Added url.fileURLToPath(url) and rl.pathToFileURL(path). These methods can be used to correctly convert between file: URLs and absolute paths.
util:
Added the sorted option to util.inspect(). If set to true, all properties of an object and Set and Map entries will be sorted in the returned string. If set to a function, it is used as a compare function.
The util.inspect.custom symbol is now defined in the global symbol registry as Symbol.for('nodejs.util.inspect.custom').
Added support for BigInt numbers in util.format().
V8 API: A number of V8 C++ APIs have been marked as deprecated since they have been removed in the upstream repository. Replacement APIs are added where necessary.
Windows: The Windows msi installer now provides an option to automatically install the tools required to build native modules.
Workers:
Debugging support for Workers using the DevTools protocol has been implemented.
The public inspector module is now enabled in Workers.

Node.js Security Handbook by Sqreen

Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js Security Handbook made for developers.

Common Node8 mistakes in Lambda

That’s it, 5 common mistakes to avoid when working with Node.js 8.10 in Lambda. Including:

Still using callbacks
Not using promisfy
Too sequential
async/await inside forEach()
Not using AWSSDK’s .promise()

Using Node.js to Read Really, Really Large Datasets & Files (Pt 1)

“In the end, Node.js’s pure file and big data handling functions fell a little short of what I needed, but with just one extra NPM package, EventStream, I was able to parse through a massive dataset without crashing the Node server.”