Node.js

Node.js is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime: it runs JavaScript outside the web browser, mostly for web servers, command-line tools and the build tools behind modern websites. It is built on Google's V8 engine, the JavaScript engine in Chrome, and handles input and output in an event-driven, non-blocking way, so a single process can serve many connections at once. Node.js comes with npm, a package manager whose public registry is the largest collection of open-source software packages in the world.

History

Ryan Dahl created Node.js in 2009, with backing from the cloud company Joyent. npm, written by Isaac Z. Schlueter, followed in 2010; the company behind it was bought by GitHub Inc. in 2020. In 2014, after disagreements over how the project was run, a group of core contributors forked it as io.js. The two projects reunited in 2015 under the new Node.js Foundation, which in 2019 merged with the JS Foundation to form the OpenJS Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. Dahl later started a separate runtime, Deno, to address what he saw as Node's design mistakes.

Releases

Even-numbered major versions become long-term support (LTS) releases, kept up to date for about two and a half years. As of October 2026, Node.js 24 is the active LTS line and Node.js 26 is due to become LTS later that month. Node.js 26 is the last version under the old twice-a-year schedule: from Node.js 27, the project ships one major release a year, in April, and promotes it to LTS in October.

Since version 22.18 (July 2025), Node.js runs TypeScript files directly by stripping out their type annotations; that is the minimum version required by tools such as Lakebed. Hosting platforms including Heroku and Netlify support Node.js apps.