Setting Your Node.js Version – Render Docs

Set a different Node.js version in any of the following ways (in descending order of precedence):

1. Set the NODE_VERSION environment variable for your service in the Render Dashboard:

2. Add a file named .node-version to the root of your repo. This file contains a single line with the version to use:

.node-version

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20.18.0

3. Add a file named .nvmrc to the root of your repo. This file uses the same format as .node-version.

4. Specify a Node.js version range in your package.json file, under the engines property:

package.json

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"engines": {
     "node": ">=20.0.0 <22.0.0"
}

If there isn't a package.json file in your repo's root directory, Render uses the first package.json file it finds in a subdirectory.

Always include an upper bound in your version range.

An unbounded range (such as >=20) always resolves to the latest release of Node.js, which increments its major version over time. This might result in unexpected behavior or incompatibilities with your development version.

You can specify either a semantic version number (such as 18.18.0) or an alias (such as lts).

Render uses the node-version-alias module to resolve version aliases and semver ranges.

History of default Node.js versions

If you don't set a Node.js version for your service, Render's default version depends on when you originally created the service: