Updating Node.js to 16+ in Replit

#node #replit #javascript #v16

Hey There,
Welcome to my first post, today i'll tell you how can you update your Replit's Nodejs version to 16+, so lets get started.

Many want to do that as to support Discord's latest v13 as it would only run on Nodejs v16.6 or higher. But there maybe your own reasons (Nobody likes old versions 😅).

Here's our repl at version 12.x.x after this tutorial it will be updated to 16+

At first go to your repl or if you don't have any just create one.

Go to the shell prompt and run the following code

npm init -y && npm i --save-dev node@16 && npm config set prefix=$(pwd)/node_modules/node && export PATH=$(pwd)/node_modules/node/bin:$PATH

After running the code you would see the following output:

And congo 🎉 your repl's nodejs has been successfully updated to 16+.
You could further confirm it by running node -v in the shell

Update: There's another better way to do this now just use the Node 16 template while creating the repl
https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/NodeJS-16

Top comments (11)

Heiker • Aug 21 '21

Nice post.

I always forget node is an npm package.

One could also use the .replit file to reference the node version inside node_modules.

run = "node_modules/.bin/node index.js"

Rajnish Anand • Aug 21 '21

Nicely Explained ✨

Arnav Kumar • Aug 21 '21

Thanks 😃

kingisawesome • Sep 26 '21

Hi! Nice post and nice solution. My problem is every time I close my replit and open it again, the node version goes back to 12+ and I have to manually update it to 16+ again. Is there a solution to permanently upgrade node.js to +16 in my own repl?

Arnav Kumar • Sep 26 '21

How do you check your version

Do you see in console panel or the shell one

The console will always show 12 even if its originally 16

The more reliable way to check is node -v

kingisawesome • Sep 26 '21 • Edited

I use the shell, and yes I use node -v and it shows version 12 after I update to 16 whenever the repl.it closes so I manually do the command everytime

Arnav Kumar • Sep 28 '21

Ig replit has changed in a while.
When i was writing the post i myself tried reopening the repl to see whether it still there or not and it was there but it doesn't happen.

A hackey solution to this would be installing node everytime you run the repl 😅

Ik it sounds strange but it may work maybe

You can try putting that code in replit run script