Unusable with up-to-date frameworks caused by Nodejs 16.15.1 environment requirement

[prodkt]

Bug report

Packages affected

• sandpack-client
• [ x ] sandpack-react

Description of the problem

Unable to use any of the frameworks Sandpack claims to support due. This seems at the cause of the hardcoded Nodejs 16.15.1 runtime requirement Sandpack has put into place.

What were you doing when the problem occurred?

I've taken the Sandpack-react package and spun up a devContainer on my local, changed the Nodejs 14.x versions I was able to find, although I found no 16.x, build those out to new release versions as a test case, with no success in any of that effort. the environment: node is stuck on 16.15.1 and I'm unable to find any needle in the haystack to fix the problem.

I've looked through the Codesandbox/nodebox package, did similar and couldn't find any 16.x hardcoded runtimes.

I've created my own template for Astro for example based on the template inside sandpack-react, updating the various frameworks over the very dated versions sandpack uses in their demo's - this is a bit unbelievable but several major release versions behind the latest to-date I found in some cases. Upon updating those frameworks to latest, the 16.x runtime isn't sufficient to use Sandpack whatsoever, in any of my test cases.

I'd tried to over-ride each package.json infiles, and including "engines: { "node": "^18.0.0" }" for example and than added files for .npmrc, .nvmrc & .yarnrc with their respective [ 'engine-strict=true', 'v18.14.1', '--install.ignore-engines true' ] helpers as the code. that would load in the file explorer with the updated package.json. This also does not work.

I've tried to deal with the very dated package versions you have in the package.json files now, but when attempting to use any extension to extend upon those packages, they were unable to be used due to dated parent packages.

Unfortunately the popularity of this package took me for a loop. It's clearly outdated, possibly unmaintained or at very least has a questionable future. I will say, on the surface it's marketed well, looks amazing until you get in to use just the core of what it bills itself to do.

What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?

I believe the above should suffice to run any or all scenarios' of what I shared to reproduce.

Link to sandbox: link (optional)

Your Environment

Software	Name/Version
Sandpack-client version
Sandpack-react version
Browser
Operating System

[danilowoz]

Hi, thanks for all details.

But I don't get, Sandpack uses Node 18 in its environment. Maybe some Sandpack dependency requires another Node version; can you point that one?