(Re)Building Glitch
A new version of Glitch.com is in the works, so we need your help!
Earlier this year, our team began working on the most important project we’ve ever done — building a whole new Glitch the way we’ve always wanted it to be, in collaboration with our community. If you’ve been following along in the forums, this won’t be a surprise, since building it in public with you is crucial to our shared vision of the next version of Glitch.
This September, we began sharing our work in the form of a development preview site, https://preview.glitch.com/. If you haven’t had the chance to review it and give feedback, please do! As you will see, we’ve been busy iterating on the new version, all while sharing ideas for features, filing bugs, and asking you to brainstorm along with us. Glitch should be something we create together and we are so excited to be working alongside the community to make that vision a reality.
For our next big phase, some of the hard work to rebuild Glitch has to happen under the hood, modernizing and updating our infrastructure. We’re kicking off this next phase soon, a long-awaited and highly requested set of upgrades that will include a move to more modern versions of Node.js. And to do that, we’re going to need your help — it’s a little bit like a collective cleanup effort that helps benefit the whole community
Retiring the very oldest versions of Node.js
Our community cleanup will start with projects that are running on the very oldest versions of Node.js — Node 6. This is a tiny percentage of Glitch apps (less than 1%), so the vast majority of you don’t have to do anything. But if you might have any Node 6 apps, we’ll have a few simple steps to follow.
Here’s what you’ll need to do: Review your projects in the Glitch dashboard, and update any projects using Node 6 within the next two weeks, by December 1. (We’re also currently working on improvements to the dashboard so that you’ll be able to easily see at a glance which version of Node.js your projects are using, so keep an eye out for that.) If you’re not sure how to do that kind of update, we’ve got a help doc and a forum thread where the community is discussing the process.
Going Forward
We’ll be deprecating older versions of Node on a timetable, meaning that if your project is using Node 8, we’ll ask that you update it to a newer version by December 15. After that, we won’t be deprecating any more versions until we’ve completed a major container update in the first quarter of 2024. You’ll get plenty of notice before any changes.
How do I update my project’s Node version?
Not sure how to update your project? We have new and updated Help Center articles to walk you through the process! It might sound complicated, but it should only require editing your project’s package.json file. Read this Help Center article for the full details. As always, if you run into any issues, you can reach our support team directly through our Help Center.
If you have any questions about this update, or the ongoing project of rebuilding Glitch, please let us know by sharing in the community forum. We’ll be sharing even more updates starting next week, so we’ll see you there!
Why are we doing this?
All of the work we’ve been doing in collaboration with our community is to set Glitch up for being a healthy, thriving and creative platform for many years to come. The beta version of Glitch launched more than seven (!) years ago, and a lot of tech has changed and been upgraded since then. This work sets us up to be able to move a lot faster and to deliver a lot more of the features you’ve asked for.
We also wanted to return to some of our original principles in creating Glitch — working more closely with our community, and supporting open ways of connecting to the rest of the web. You’re already starting to see some of the first results of that work on our new preview site.
Upgrading a platform where every creator is a coder who can have complete control of their code is a tricky process. Doing that at a scale of millions of apps and users is even more challenging. We’re excited about the chance to do this process together with all of you, and really appreciative of the trust and patience you all consistently show as we have been doing this work.