As our next-generation extensibility platform, designed to replace Rules & Hooks, our plan is to support every current and long-term supported Node version through Actions exclusively.
We recently introduced Node 16 support in Actions. Node 16 is the current version published by Node. This version does not introduce any breaking changes.
What Does This Mean for Our Developers?
We will continue to support Node 12 through the Long Term Support (LTS) end coming in April 2022 for all of our extensibility products - Actions, Rules, and Hooks. However, we encourage developers to stay current in their Node version for security and compliance purposes.
Developers using Actions
All new Actions will be set to the Node 16 runtime by default. However, you do not need to migrate every Action immediately to Node 16.
Unlike Rules and Hooks, Actions is designed to run actions of varying Node runtimes side by side. With Actions, you no longer need to migrate all code to a single, tenant-level Node runtime. Existing Actions can be upgraded to Node 16 by creating and deploying a new version to Node 16. If needed, existing Actions built on Node 12 can be upgraded to Node 16 and reverted to Node 12.
Developers using legacy extensibility products
Our legacy extensibility products (Rules and Hooks) will continue to support Node 12. Node 16 will only roll out to Actions.
We strongly encourage developers using Rules and Hooks to migrate to Actions, wherever possible, to start taking advantage of the greatly improved developer experience that comes with Actions, such as an industry standard VS Code style editor, typescript, draft mode, version control, improved secret management, an expanded library of NPM modules, and more.
For developers using Node 8, if there are Rules and Hooks that cannot be immediately migrated to Actions Node 16, at a minimum, update your code to Node 12. Node 8 reached the end of LTS back in December 2019 and since then has not been updated to address critical bugs, security fixes, patches, or other important updates.
We want to hear from you. Please share any feedback on your experience with Actions and the Node 16 update in our Developer Community.
