Has anyone ran into issues installing NodeJS 18 on AL2023 starting w/ 2023.7.20250331 ? I can’t find any mention of it besides that alternatives is now working w/ v20 and v22 (potentially in 2023.7.20250414). Very confused if it is a mistake or This release contains the change to the nodejs20 package means ‘no more 18’ Via https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/release-notes/relnotes-2023.7.20250331.html#major-updates-2023.7.20250331|link
“This change will be non-disruptive for the majority of customers.” (I am the minority, apparently)
For my own edification, just in case. It seems like w/ the alternatives tool, if you install a version it will remove OTHER versions of Node … so it would fail installing nodejs 18 because 20 was the default, but somehow REMOVE 18!? wonky.
It appears that when you manually set a newer version with lower priority than the version with the default higher priority, it uninstalls the older version automatically, currently this would remove v18. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/nodejs.html has some info on how this all ‘works’.
sudo dnf install -qy nodejs (or nodejs-22)
alternatives --config node would allow you to select interactively.
sudo alternatives --set node /usr/bin/node-20 sets it manually in our deploy script. When it was doing sudo yum -y install nodejs (yum is aliased to dnf)
