Node.js 27: current & latest floating tags #1171

Situation

Node.js images on Docker Hub make use of floating tags:

• current (including variations like current-bookworm-slim)
• latest

which are both floated up to the latest node:26.x.x* as each succeeding Node.js 26.x version is released.

According to the phase diagram in the README here in this repo, when Node.js 26.x transitions into its Active LTS phase there is no longer any current version.

Users of the current tag would be stuck at the last non-LTS version of Node.js 26.x and would jump to Node.js 27.x 6 months later when Node.js 27.x exits its Alpha phase.

Suggestion

This was also raised in tj/n#847 (comment) with the proposal for the n Node.js version manager, defining the tags as follows:

• current highest non-alpha release
• latest highest release (may include alpha)

This seems like a good general definition for Docker images and Node.js version managers.

Perhaps there is some way to incorporate this into the phase naming used in this repo?

Users of Docker images and Node.js version managers would benefit if there is consistency in alias names across utilities.

Would that be consistent with the planned usage for https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/ with Node.js 27.x?

There is no alias https://nodejs.org/dist/current/ defined at this time.

An alternate tag naming scheme would be to leave current and latest defined as the highest non-alpha release, and introduce a new tag, for example next, that points to the highest release, which could be an alpha release or it could be a non-alpha release when there is no alpha phase open. In the latter case current, latest and next would point to the same release.

Other

There is a generic issue nodejs/docker-node#2524 open to plan for building Node.js Docker images based Node.js 27 Alpha releases. This is currently in the planning stage, and no changes have been made so far to any processes to deal with the future Node.js 27 release line in that repo.

cc: @shadowspawn @nschonni