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Node 20 will be deprecated on GitHub Actions runners

Node 20 will be deprecated on GitHub Actions runners

12 comments

·September 20, 2025
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bramblerose

I find the repeated deprecations on GitHub Actions frustrating to work with. One of the key goals of a build system is to be able to come back to a project after several years and just having the build work out of the box.

Yet with GHA I need to update actions/checkout@v2 to actions/checkout@vwhatever (or, what I'm doing now, actions/checkout@main because the actual API haven't actually changed) because... some Node version is "out of maintenance"?!

GHA is literally code execution as a service. Why would I care whether the Node runner has a security vulnerability?

easton

> Why would I care whether the Node runner has a security vulnerability?

I’m guessing they know you don’t care, but the big company customers cant have a CVE anywhere and won’t accept a EOL node version so they can check a box on something.

(I guess there’s also people with self hosted runners, who might be running them inside networks that aren’t segmented.)

tracker1

... then your infrastructure deployment keys leak as a result.

sethops1

Just want to plug https://github.com/ChristopherHX/github-act-runner (not mine)

It's re-implementation of the GHA self-hosted runner in Go for self-hosted runners, based on the popular https://github.com/nektos/act for running GHA locally. Been using this for over a year now and it's been infinitely useful for CI on otherwise unsupported systems (e.g. freeBSD, openBSD in my case).

hamandcheese

From the readme:

> Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your .github/workflows/ to replace your Makefile!

This is ass backwards. Throwing out a tried and true build system in favor of a vendor-specific yaml format? Wtf? Just invoke make from your actions ffs.

Wowfunhappy

> Node24 is incompatible with macOS 13.4 and lower versions.

I have NodeJS 24 working all the way back on macOS 10.9 [1]. I realize official support is a very different thing, but I'm still a little surprised they can't do better than Ventura.

1: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Node-24-Mavericks/blob/master...

stackskipton

Ops type here, something important to understand is Node is language the runner client uses so in particular, this is impactful for anyone building self-hosted runners and a will be a problem for anyone still writing Node 20 applications that just use self-hosted runner Node.

OptionOfT

Very sad they went from 20 to 24. No 22.

OTOH I've been moving from native NodeJS actions to packing them in a Docker container to separate code from compiled code.

If you wanted to use Typescript for your action you always had a 2 step process because GitHub Actions required you to pack dependencies with ncc or vite or webpack.

This packaged version was subsequently committed to the main branch.

Technically I could do a composite action where I compile the typescript on the fly, but that was fragile last time I tried it.

romellem

Is there a specific part of Node 22 that isn’t there in Node 24?

STRiDEX

What are you doing that requires checking in the compiled version. Esbuild takes like one second

OptionOfT

The code is written in typescript. So we go from

    * cloning the action 
    * running the dist/index.js
to

    * Cloning the action
    * npm install
    * npm compile
    * npm run

esafak

It's safe to use the LTS, which you can track here: https://endoflife.date/nodejs