Update tooling to move away from nginx's directory listing result

[flakey5]

We currently have to emulate nginx's directory listing result so to not break tooling in other repos (ex/ nodejs/citgm#1028). This isn't ideal and we'd like to update the tooling around this so this isn't the case.

[MikeMcC399]

Are there any concrete working plans for this? You kindly responded in nodejs/docker-node#2514 and this issue has yet to be resolved.

I'm wondering if a scheme like Chrome for Testing uses with their JSON API endpoints could be adapted for Node.js, for instance to find the latest version for a specific release line, and / or the corresponding download location.

[MattIPv4]

@MikeMcC399 We already have an index.json file that folks should be consuming, which contains all the release data folks need. This issue is regarding moving away from folks parsing index.html.

To move this forward, we really need the owners of tooling reliant on index.html to update their tools to read from index.json instead -- we can assist there, but we don't own/know about all these tools.

[MikeMcC399]

@MattIPv4

docker-node is using https://nodejs.org/dist/index,json already, however in

https://github.com/nodejs/docker-node/blob/main/update.sh#L118

it is additionally scraping with baseuri=https://nodejs.org/dist

fullVersion="$(curl -sSL --compressed "${baseuri}" | grep '<a href="v'"${version}." | sed -E 's!.<a href="v([^"/]+)/?".!\1!' | cut -d'.' -f2,3 | sort -V | tail -1)"

It's being doing that for years. That is causing a problem (see nodejs/docker-node#2514), and it needs fixing on the docker-node side.

That probably will get into even more problems with the planned alpha releases for Node.js 27 if it's not addressed.

[MattIPv4]

👍 I (and by that I mean an agent on my behalf) am happy to get a PR open there to update that script to consume the JSON file if no one else is.

[MikeMcC399]

@MattIPv4

I see you've gone ahead with a PR nodejs/docker-node#2598. That's fine by me. I'm relatively new to the docker-node repo, and I've been deferring to those who've been involved for years already, also because I still don't understand all the ins and out of the set of actions and scripts for updating versions.

[MattIPv4]

Yeh, I'm not super familiar with it either, and maybe there is more context on why it reads from the HTML instead of the JSON, but I didn't see anything in the linked issue, so I figured opening a PR for it would be the easiest way to push that conversation forward.