Upcoming Release -- Plan for the Future
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Beginning with the next Reactor release, there will be some dependency changes and new deprecations.
These apply to users on bare-metal installs only. If you are running Reactor in a docker container, the following does not apply to you — the container supplies its own dependencies and will be up-to-date.
All versions of nodejs prior to 18 are now end-of-life (no maintenance), so starting with the next Reactor build, they are deprecated for use with Reactor; they will continue to work until March 1 2024 (about 3 months from now), so you need to upgrade before that date. The recommended version of nodejs is 20, which is the current long-term support (LTS) version (EOL in mid-2026). Version 18 is the prior LTS version and still supported (by OpenJS Foundation and Reactor) until mid-2025, so it's a good fallback if you have issues getting version 20 running. As of this writing, the current 20 is 20.10.0, and the current 18 is 18.18.2. Both have been tested with Reactor 23302.
Now, nodejs version 20.9.0 seems to have dependencies that are not easily resolved on Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) Buster (Debian 10). If you are using an RPi running Buster, you should select nodejs 18. That gives you until mid-2025 to upgrade both nodejs and the RPi OS to a more modern version (the current RPi OS is bookworm, Debian 12, 64-bit). The
tools/rpi-install.sh
script will be enhanced for the next build to try to discern what is reasonable for your system and make the appropriate upgrades; it is safe to run even on a current Reactor install.If you are running an OS other than Raspberry Pi OS, try for nodejs 20, but use 18 as a fallback if you can't get it installed and running.
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