Hi all!

I want to contribute support for reading nodejs version from package.json, since that is what we use to tell Heroku which nodejs version to use on our production server.

Example:

  "engines": {
    "node": "18"
  },

package.json

My question is, are there any known pitfalls to have support for this? Perhaps, the decision to only support a .npmrc file, is rooted in that the above support is problematic?

I have found a couple of related issues in the bug tracker:

1. .nvmrc with non-default Node.js version does not work #3016 (same issue as me, although I do not use nvm)
2. lockfile: engines array is stored as object #4518 (related to a possible implementation - I have not seen the engines field as an Array before though)
3. Pnpm errors when run with compatible "engines.pnpm" field in package.json #7124 (related to a possible implementation - pnpm does already read package.json - was there a deliberate decision to not support using a nodejs version declared in package.json?)
4. https://github.com/orgs/pnpm/discussions/7140 (related to a possible implementation - I will take a look at plugin-commands-env)

If there no known issues about using/installing semver nodejs version from package.json, similar to use-node-version, I will create an issue and try to find the appropriate place for such an implementation.

PS. For point 2, concat-stream 1.6.2 actually uses an Array...