When I was in the process of working on one of my Glitch projects, I discovered an error in the way Glitch detects what version of Node to run.
The current way uses the following function found at /opt/watcher/app-types/utils.sh:
parse-node-version () {
local raw=$1;
echo "$raw" | grep -o '[0-9]\+' | head -n 1
}
As you can see, this approach only take the major version from the version string, and disregards everything else.
This is propably not a big problem for the majority of projects, however, it can have some undesired consequences; E.g, the version strings 12.x and 12.3.x will evaluate to the same version: 12.
In my case, I had specified the version >=12.9.0 because my code relies on features introduced in this version of Node. However, this caused Glitch to use Node version 12.0.0, the highest available version of Node 12, instead of using the available Node 14 version: 14.15.2.
For now, I fixed it by defining a slightly modified install and start script, which in turn calls a modified version of parse-node-version capable of correctly selecting a valid Node version based on a version range. But, it would be nice not having to do that in the future.