Node.js for builds

Node.js and npm for build steps — compiling a theme, bundling front-end assets, running a bundler over your CSS. A tool the build runs in, not a container that runs beside your site: nothing of it is started, it belongs to no machine, and it is gone by the time the release is serving.

That is the whole difference between this and Node.js as an application. If your site is a Node application — Next.js, Nuxt, Express — you want that one, which runs continuously and answers requests. If your site is PHP and merely needs npm run build during a deploy, you want this one.

Both can be true at once. A Drupal site with a themed front end uses PHP-FPM to serve and this to build.

#Versions

A deprecated version still runs and is still what some sites are on. It is listed so you can move before it goes, rather than finding out on the morning a build stops resolving it.

Pin the version, not the build: name 26.10 and the platform matches it to the current build, so a security rebuild reaches you without anybody editing a repository.

#What you can change

Nothing on this one. Everything it takes decides where it connects, what it is, or whether it starts — and an application able to set those could break its own environment in ways nothing here would catch.

#Using it

Name it in vallic.yaml, and run the steps that need it in its image with image: node. A step without image runs in your application's own container, and the PHP image has no node or npm in it:

services:
  - node: '26'

build:
  steps:
    - name: PHP dependencies
      run: composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
    - name: Theme
      run: npm ci && npm run build
      image: node

The step runs against the same checkout as the others, so what it writes — a compiled theme, a bundle — is in the release. npm's download cache is kept between builds for you. Anything it installs that production does not need, node_modules above all, is worth removing in the same step, because the release is copied to every machine that runs it.

#Next

• vallic.yaml — where build steps are declared
• Node.js — running a Node application rather than building with it