You may have read my update on Node.js 18 moving to LTS as part of my update in Introducing Node.js 19 and now want to use it in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). While the community promotes the next LTS version in October every year, it does take a little bit of time for the LTS version to be availble in RHEL. This is due to lead times and existing schedules for RHEL. Generally the next LTS will be available in RHEL sometime in December following the promotion in the community in October.
The question you might be asking is how can I prepare/test out Node.js 18 in advance of the LTS version being available? There are two options that are available.
- If you use the pre-built Node.js images from the Red Hat container catalog, you can use the centos8 stream containers that were made available for early testing. These are available as sclorg/nodejs-18-c8s in Quay.
- If you install the rpms directly, then you can use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta which is now available.
Both of these options will include an earlier non-LTS version of Node.js 18, but they will let you test/out prepare for the LTS release of Node.js in RHEL near the end of this year. In many cases the versions they include will already cover most of the changes that made it into Node.js 18 LTS and testing against these version will be a good way to prepare in advance.
I hope this was useful and helps you do some advance testing. To learn more about what Red Hat is up to on the Node.js front, check out our Node.js page.
