Node.js has a regular release cycle which is documented in the release schedule. At the time of this writing, there are 3 stable maintained releases: 16, 18, and 20. I'll refer you to that documentation to understand how the release cycle works.
Deciding which version of Node.js to use for a project is a trade-off between using the latest features and stability.
The Epic Stack is more focused on stably shipping web apps than experimenting with the latest features which is where the Active Long-Term Support (LTS) version really shines.
We deploy our apps in Docker containers, and there are various base images we can use as options which you can find on the Node.js Docker Hub. Aside from the version, there flavors of the base image which are based on the Linux distribution used. Feel free to read more about the different flavors on Docker Hub. One of the goals for us here is to not ship more than we need in production.
An additional consideration we'll add as context here is what version of Linux to have our base image built on. With the same pragmatic approach as the Node.js version we want to balance latest features with stability. We'll use the Debian release cycle as a guide for this.
Use the current LTS version of Node.js as the default in the starter.
We'll use the slim flavor of the node.js images.
We'll use the bookworm flavor of the node.js images (which is the current
stable version of Debian: v12).
Folks should hopefully run into few compatibility issues. It's possible they will need features that are not back-ported to the current active LTS version, however it's trivial to update the Node.js version. Added documentation to the managing updates docs should help people manage this.
We'll need to update the Node.js version in the starter whenever the active LTS version changes.
Folks who need a bunch more out of their operating system packages will need to
switch from the slim flavor which only involves updating the Dockerfile. It
is possible some will not realize they need more than slim until they run the
Docker image (which many people will only do in production). However the
likelihood of this impacting anyone is pretty low.
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