Download Node.js 5.0.0

Node.js is open source and platform independent and is focused on developing server-side web applications. Those applications are written in JavaScript and run within the Node.js runtime on the server. It offers an event-driven environment where non-blocking I/O has been an important starting point. For more information, we refer you to this page. The development team has released version 5.0, a standard release with eight months of support. The release notes are listed below for you:

Node v5.0.0 (Stable)

Say hello to Node.js v5! It’s true that we only recently released Node.js v4.0.0, however this new release doesn’t mean that v4 is going away. In fact, v4 is going to live for a lot longer than v5.

According to our new LTS (Long-term Support) plan, Node.js v4 Argon will continue to be supported for 30 months, ending in April 2018. This new version of Node.js, however, will only be supported for 8 months, with a new major version, v6, being released in April 2016. Node.js v6 will eventually turn into a new LTS version that will have a similar support timeline to v4. In this way, we will have a new Stable version of Node.js every 6 months with every second one of these turning into an LTS line. If our LTS plan is new to you, read more about how it’s going to work so you can make a properly informed decision regarding what version of Node.js to adopt.

The general rule for deciding which version of Node.js to use is:

• Stay on or upgrade to Node.js v4.2.x if you need stability and have a complex production environmenteg you are a medium or large enterprise.
• Upgrade to Node.js v5.x if you have the ability to upgrade versions quickly and easily without distributing your environment and want to play with the latest features as they arrive.

The release notes below are annotated with the main breaking changes that warrant the jump to v5. Note that because this new version of Node.js is shipping with a new version of V8, you will need to recompile any native add-ons you have already installed or you will receive a runtime error when trying to load them. Use npm rebuild or simply remove your _nodemodules directory and npm install from scratch.

Notable Changes

• buffer: (Breaking) Removed both ‘raw’ and ‘raws’ encoding types from Buffer, these have been deprecated for a long time (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2859.
• console: (Breaking) Values ​​reported by console.time() now have 3 decimals of accuracy added (Michaël Zasso) #3166.
• fs:
  • fs.readFile*(), fs.writeFile*(), and fs.appendFile*() now also accept a file descriptor as their first argument (Johannes Wüller) #3163.
  • (Breaking) In fs.readFile(), if an encoding is specified and the internal toString() fails the error is no longer thrown but is passed to the callback (Evan Lucas) #3485.
  • (Breaking) In fs.read() (using the fs.read(fd, length, position, encoding, callback) form), if the internal toString() fails the error is no longer thrown but is passed to the callback (Evan Luke) #3503.
• http:
  • Fixed a bug where pipelined http requests would stall (Fedor Indutny) #3342.
  • (Breaking) When parsing HTTP, don’t add duplicates of the following headers: Retry-After, ETag, Last-Modified, Server, Age, Expires. This is in addition to the following headers which already block duplicates: Content-Type, Content-Length, User-Agent, Referer, Host, Authorization, Proxy-Authorization, If-Modified-Since, If-Unmodified-Since, From, Location Max Forwards (James M Snell) #3090.
  • (Breaking) The callback argument to OutgoingMessage#setTimeout() must be a function or a TypeError is thrown (James M Snell) #3090.
  • (Breaking) HTTP methods and header names must now conform to the RFC 2616 “token” rule, a list of allowed characters that excludes control characters and a number of separator characters. Specifically, methods and header names must now match /^[a-zA-Z0-9_!#$%&’*+.^`|~-]+$/ or a TypeError will be thrown (James M Snell) #2526.
• node:
  • (Breaking) Deprecated the _linklist module (Rich Trott) #3078.
  • (Breaking) Removed require.paths and require.registerExtension(), both had been previously set to throw Error when accessed (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2922.
• npm: Upgraded to version 3.3.6 from 2.14.7, see for more details. This is a major version bump for npm and it has seen a significant amount of change. Please see the original npm v3.0.0 release notes for a list of major changes (Rebecca Turner) #3310.
• src: (Breaking) Bumped NODE_MODULE_VERSION to 47 from 46, this is necessary due to the V8 upgrade. Native add-ons will need to be recompiled (Rod Vagg) #3400.
• timers: Attempt to reuse the timer handle for setTimeout().unref(). This fixes a long-standing known issue where unrefed timers would perviously hold beforeExit open (Fedor Indutny) #3407.
• tls:
  • Added ALPN Support (Shigeki Ohtsu) #2564.
  • TLS options can now be passed in an object to createSecurePair() (????????? ????) #2441.
  • (Breaking) The default minimum DH key size for tls.connect() is now 1024 bits and a warning is shown when DH key size is less than 2048 bits. This is a security consideration to prevent “logjam” attacks. A new minDHSize TLS option can be used to override the default. (Shigeki Ohtsu) #1831.
• util:
  • (Breaking) util.p() was deprecated for years, and has now been removed (Wyatt Preul) #3432.
  • (Breaking) util.inherits() can now work with ES6 classes. This is considered a breaking change because of potential subtle side-effects caused by a change from directly reassigning the prototype of the constructor using ctor.prototype = Object.create(superCtor.prototype, { constructor: { … } }) to using Object.setPrototypeOf(ctor.prototype, superCtor.prototype) (Michael Zasso) #3455.
• v8: (Breaking) Upgraded to 4.6.85.25 from 4.5.103.35 (Ali Ijaz Sheikh) #3351.
  • Implements the spread operator, see for further information.
  • Implements new.target, see for further information.
• zlib: Decompression now throws on truncated input (eg unexpected end of file) (Yuval Brik) #2595.

Known issues

• Surrogate pair in REPL can freeze terminal. #690
• Calling dns.setServers() while a DNS query is in progress can cause the process to crash on a failed assertion. #894
• url.resolve may transfer the auth portion of the url when resolving between two full hosts, see #1435.
• Unicode characters in filesystem paths are not handled consistently across platforms or Node.js APIs. see #2088, #3401 and #3519.