website Compatibility with recent node versions

As even Ubuntu comes with Node.JS 18 nowadays we should fix our build process for versions >=14.

Dec 13 '22 12:12 mal-tee

End of life for Node 14 is 2023-04-30, with Node 18 being the current LTS.

Dec 31 '22 13:12 davenewham

The main problem is that new node versions ship a fixed OpenSSL version that's not compatible with webpack4. The very dirty hotfix is export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider;, but I haven't attempted that yet. In theory it is possible to configure a different hashFunction via webpack options. But with "sha256", I run into weird undefined errors with babel down the line. (Although that could be completely unrelated).

https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/14532

The non-hacky way to proceed is upgrading to webpack 5.

Mar 03 '23 19:03 mal-tee

The non-hacky way to proceed is upgrading to webpack 5.

Instead of investing effort into that, I would much rather recommend switching to Hugo for the JS build as well.

Mar 03 '23 20:03 baltpeter

Sure!

Mar 04 '23 11:03 mal-tee

Node 18 is LTS but is our of "Active Support", now in "Security Support". Latest LTS is Node 20 (10 month "Active Support" remaining, 2 years and 4 month "Security Support" remaining)

Node 20 LTS should be our target now (after getting rid of webpack, by migration to hugo)

Dec 24 '23 02:12 christian-weiss

I will finally give switching away from Webpack another go. See #1211.

Oct 24 '25 13:10 baltpeter