19 posts tagged with "Node.js"

I often use the Azure Static Web Apps CLI for local development. It's not only handy when building Azure Static Web Apps, but also when building other types of web app, which also rely upon both a frontend server and some kind of API server. The Azure Static Web Apps CLI is particularly handy if you want to spoof authentication / authorization as well.

Changes in the behaviour of Node.js in version 17 caused issues with the Static Web Apps CLI. You can read a previous post which discussed this. However, whilst the issue was fixed in version 1.1.4 of the Static Web Apps CLI, it caused significant performance regressions in the CLIs dev server functionality.

This post shows you how to improve your developer experience by using Vite server proxy instead.

I love using .env files to configure my applications. They're a great way to keep configuration in one place and to keep it out of the codebase. They're also a great way to keep secrets out of the codebase.

But what if you need to use a multiline string in a .env file? How do you do that? You just do it:

SINGLE_LINE="you know what..."
MULTI_LINE="you know what you did
LAST SUMMER"

That's right, you just use a newline character. It's that simple. Oddly, searching for that on the internet didn't yield the answer I was looking for. So I'm writing it down here for posterity.

With your .env file in place, you can then consume it in your application using a package like dotenv. Or if you'd like to use a bash script to consume the .env file, you can do it like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -a
source test.env
set +a

npm run start # or whatever you need to do

I make use of Azure Static Web Apps a lot. I recently upgraded to Node.js 18 and found that the Static Web Apps CLI no longer worked when trying to run locally; the API would not connect when running swa start:

[swa] ❌ Could not connect to "http://localhost:7071/". Is the server up and running?

This post shares a workaround. This works for v1.1.3 or earlier of the Static Web Apps CLI. If you're using v1.1.4 or later, you should not need this workaround. But in that case you might find this post helpful on improving performance with 1.1.4 or later.

I've wanted to take a look at some of the alternative JavaScript runtimes for a while. The thing that has held me back is npm compatibility. I want to be able to run my code in a runtime that isn't Node.js and still be able to use npm packages. I've been using ts-node for a long time now; it's what I reach for when I'm building any kind of console app. In this post I want to port a console app from ts-node to Bun and see how easy it is.

Node.js 18 doesn't allow legacy TLS renegotion by default. But some APIs still need it. Also, corporate network traffic network is often subject to SSL inspection and that can manifest as a downgrade in TLS negotiation. Palo Alto Networks SSL Inbound Inspection is an example of an SSL inspector that can downgrade TLS.

This post shows how to support work around this issue with Axios.

Support for Node.js 16 for Azure Pipelines custom pipelines task extensions has arrived. From a TypeScript perspective, this post documents how to migrate from a Node.js 10 custom task to one that runs on Node 16 using azure-pipelines-task-lib.

This post demonstrates enriching an XML sitemap with lastmod timestamps based on git commits. The sitemap being enriched in this post was generated automatically by Docusaurus. The techniques used are predicated on the way Docusaurus works; in that it is file based. You could easily use this technique for another file based website solution; but you would need tweaks to target the relevant files you would use to drive your lastmod.

If you're interested in applying the same technique to your RSS / Atom / JSON feeds in Docusaurus, you may find this post interesting.

This post demonstrates reading and writing XML in Node.js using fast-xml-parser. We'll use the Docusauruses XML sitemap as an example.

Azure Static Web Apps presently fixes to Node.js 14 when building. If you require a different version of Node to build, this can be a problem. This post outlines a workaround.

Builds can be made faster using tools like esbuild. However, if you're invested in webpack but would still like to take advantage of speedier builds, there is a way. This post takes us through using esbuild alongside webpack using esbuild-loader.

The Azure DevOps Client library for Node.js has limitations and missing features, IGitApi.getRefs is missing pagination and IWikiApi is missing page create or update. This post details some of these issues and illustrates a workaround using the Azure DevOps REST API.

Yarn PnP is an innovation by the Yarn team designed to speed up module resolution by node. To quote the (excellent) docs:

I'd been meaning to automate the npm publishing of ts-loader for the longest time. I had attempted to use Travis to do this in the same way as fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. Alas using secure environment variables in Travis has unfortunate implications for ts-loader's test pack.

Updated 18/06/2017​

Whilst things did improve by fiddling with Windows Defender it wasn't a 100% fix which makes me wary. Interestingly, VS Code was always open when I did experience the issue and I haven't experienced it when it's been closed. So it may be the cause. I've opened an issue for this against the VS Code repo - it sounds like other people may be affected as I was. Perhaps this is VS Code and not Windows Defender. Watch that space...

Updated 12/07/2017​

The issue was VS Code. The bug has now been fixed and shipped last night with VS Code 1.14.0. Yay!

I'm a member of the Definitely Typed team - and hopefully I won't be kicked out for writing this. My point is this: .d.ts files should live with the package they provide typing information for, in npm / GitHub etc. Not separately.

I don't know about you but I personally feel that the following sentence may well be the saddest in the English language:

This is very probably the dullest title for a blog post I've ever come up with. Read on though folks - it's definitely going to pick up...

How I managed to gulp-angular-templatecache working inside Visual Studio​

Every now and then something bites you unexpectedly. After a certain amount of pain, the answer comes to you and you know you want to save others from falling into the same deathtrap.

There I was minding my own business and having a play with a Gulp plugin called gulp-angular-templatecache. If you're not aware of it, it "Concatenates and registers AngularJS templates in the $templateCache". I was planning to use it so that all the views in an Angular app of mine were loaded up-front rather than on demand. (It's a first step in making an "offline-first" version of that particular app.)

Updated 17/02/2015: I've taken the approach discussed in this post a little further - you can see here​