Node10 provider available for Agent v2.144.0

It’s been a while that developers of Azure DevOps build/release tasks have been stuck on NodeJs v6.10.3 (available since agent v2.117.0). In the past days, a new pre-release of the agent came out that supports NodeJs 10 runtime. This is a great news but a bit ‘under-advertised’.

Let’s see what it is all about.

Starting with version v2.144.0 a new provider, called Node10 is supported. It is still a pre-release, but I’m confident that soon we will get a proper release with this new provider available.

To start using it, your task needs to reference it in the following way. In your task.json file just specify under the execution node, instead of probably just Node, Node10.

Example:

"execution": {
        "Node10": {
            "target": "task.js",
            "argumentFormat": ""
        }
    }

This means that in this case, your task implementation will run on NodeJs v10.13.0.
You are now free to use the Node 10 meanwhile if you are developing in TypeScript, then you can target ES2018 in this case. And if you are using TypeScript 3.2, some new features like BigInt may become available (by adding esnext.bigint to the lib setting in your compiler options).

Also do not forget to set in your task the “minimumAgentVersion” to:

"minimumAgentVersion": "2.144.0"

Cheers