Provide working recommendation for contributor Node.js switching

[MikeMcC399]

What would you like?

I would like to be able to follow the recommendations in CONTRIBUTING: Requirements to switch Node.js.

---

Requirements

You must have the following installed on your system to contribute locally:

• Node.js (See the root .node-version file for minimum version requirements. You can use avn to automatically switch to the right version of Node.js for this repo.)

---

Why is this needed?

This is convenient when contributing to multiple Cypress repositories with different Node.js requirements.

Other

The recommendation to use avn is outdated. It no longer works.

• The issues list https://github.com/wbyoung/avn/issues indicate that it is incompatible with the versions of Node.js supported by the current version of Cypress i.e. Node.js 14 and later.
• I tried it on Ubuntu 22.04 with nvm v0.39.3 and it shows errors when installing and does not switch Node.js when changing to a directory containing .node-version.
• The last update to the repository avn was three years ago.

Suggestion

Either:

• recommend a substitute for avn which is compatible with Node.js 14 and later or
• consider switching to using .nvmrc which is compatible with the POSIX-shell version of nvm. See .nvmrc.

Related discussion

This follows on from cypress-io/github-action#853 (comment) from @emilyrohrbough which drew my attention to this section.

[MikeMcC399]

• See also Specify Node.js without npm --local deprecation bug #26443

[shadowspawn]

For interest, there are a variety of node-version managers which support the .node-version file: https://github.com/shadowspawn/node-version-usage

(nvm does not directly support changing node when change directory, and does not support the .node-version file.)

[lmiller1990]

I have been using n - here to manager my Node.js versions. It works with .node-version and .nvmrc by the looks of things.

[MikeMcC399]

@lmiller1990 / @emilyrohrbough

Is there consensus to recommend that contributors to this repo use:

• n (n – Interactively Manage Your Node.js Versions) instead of the outdated
• avn (Automatic Version Switching for Node.js)?

(I bet that would please @shadowspawn 😃!)

I can't weigh in on this at the moment since I have been using nvm on Ubuntu and nvm-windows on Windows 11.

If n (n – Interactively Manage Your Node.js Versions) is considered the tool of choice for POSIX-based systems then I would migrate and submit a PR to document this.

For Windows (where I am not using WSL2) I would stay with nvm-windows. But in any case I had extreme issues trying to build Cypress on Windows and I have abandoned it for that use-case, although it is perfectly good for other repos.

[lmiller1990]

Do we need to make a recommendation? I think most developers probably prefer to decide how they'd like to manage their Node.js version on their own. WDYT? We could add a list - eg "You need to use Node.js version XXX, here are some tools you can consider which will help manage the Node.js versions your machine has installed".

[MikeMcC399]

If you don't want to make a specific recommendation, then my suggestion for a replacement text would be:

---

Requirements

You must have the following installed on your system to contribute locally:

• Node.js (See the root .node-version file for version requirements. For a list of available tools that can assist switching to the version of Node.js specified by .node-version see https://github.com/shadowspawn/node-version-usage.)

[MikeMcC399]

I tried out n (n – Interactively Manage Your Node.js Versions) on Ubuntu and found it was better than nvm in respect to pnpm and Yarn in that I did not need to reinstall the other package managers globally after installing a new Node.js version. So I plan to use n on Ubuntu in future. (I need all three package managers (npm, pnpm and Yarn) when I'm working on cypress-io/github-action).

[MikeMcC399]

• I've submitted PR docs: revise contributor advice for node.js setup #26652 now, which resolves the issue and hopefully meets everyone's needs!