Problem
Bubble had at least half a year to anticipate AWS discontinuing support for NodeJS 12, but failed to proactively migrate to NodeJS 14 before the October 31, 2022 hard stop by AWS. The consequence is that many custom plugins failed, starting November 1, 2022. Some failed in run time, and some cannot even rebuild their dependencies in the plugin editor.
We spent yesterday afternoon conducting a forensic autopsy of Bubble server logs and GitHub change logs after a swath of our plugins failed dramatically. We deduced that the failure mode was due Bubble defaulting to using the “latest” NPM package versions in the plugin editor. Thus when NPM package maintainers anticipated the ending of NodeJS 12 support on AWS by releasing package versions that both:
- Removed references to NodeJS 12 specific language constructs.
- Added references to NodeJS 14 language constructs.
their packages failed in the Bubble environment, because Bubble is scheduled to remain on NodeJS 12 for at least 2 weeks into November.
Workaround
Our temporary band-aid to this problem is to find the last version of each package that still supported NodeJS 12 and then carrot “^” pin in the dependencies to non-breaking changes to the package.
In two weeks we will see how well this fairs.