8 ms·
Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js
Colin here, creator of Nub. I’ve had the general shape of this in mind for years. Nub runs your code with stock `node`, augmented with a `--require` preload hook[0] that adds a transpiler (oxc-powered, packaged as a Node-API add-on), registers a module resolution hook[1], and injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc. All purely additive, your code ultimately runs using Node’s actual engine & stdlib implementations.
[0] https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#-require-module
[1] https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...
- esafak 3mo agoWill you be able to integrate aube updates after vendoring it? https://github.com/nubjs/nub/pull/81 https://github.com/nubjs/nub/pull/81
- colinmcd 3mo agoCertainly. We're using subtrees now instead of submodules, lets avoids some tricky worktree/submodule interactions during local dev. We've already pulled changes since that PR landed. https://github.com/nubjs/nub/commit/b4abee87 https://github.com/nubjs/nub/commit/b4abee87
- campak 3mo agobig fan of nub and nubnub the mascot. Seriously though, this is a great project. I'm super intruiged and been using for the past week or at least since it released
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ssalbdivad 3mo agoJust merged a PR migrating our entire monorepo to nub. 0 issues, ridiculously fast.
- bookernath 3mo agoNice, I think this fills a niche. Does it work on cloudflare workers?
- colinmcd 3mo agoCloudflare Workers is a different runtime and has its own toolchain around it. Nub could theoretically support it when executing files (spawn `wrangler dev` instead of `node` if wrangler.toml is detected or something) but really I'm focused on making the Node.js experience as good as possible. The other pieces of the toolkit could absolutely be used: package manager, script runner, package runner. Works with anything that implements the Node module resolution algorithm (actually Yarn PnP also works out of the box...).
- GL26 3mo agonice ! does this work on docker containers ?
- colinmcd 3mo agoYep, full support on macOS, Linux, Windows. No official image yet (I'll start on this now) but you can get started with something like this. FROM node:26-slim RUN npm i -g @nubjs/nub Works with any Node version down to 18.19 but recommend 22.15+ for best performance (that's when synchronous registerHooks was introduced[0]) [0] https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoptions https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#moduleregisterhooksoption...
- sgarrity 3mo agoI didn't even click on the link. I just came to give the author a hat-tip on the project name. Well played.
- gorjusborg 3mo agoVery smart. You can't lose all your customers for vibe-coding a migration to Rust if you are already written in Rust ;)
- Zambyte 3mo agoThey'll get bought out by OpenAI and convert the project to Zig
- airstrike 3mo agohuh, is OpenAI embracing Zig specifically? TIL
- allthetime 3mo agoIt’s a joke about how Anthropic bought bun and then rewrote bun from zig to rust with a giant one week vibe code. The joke hinges on the fact that this would be the opposite (OpenAI, nub, rust to zig)
- airstrike 3mo agooh LOL I'm slow today ig
- lacoolj 3mo agoIt also helps if you're already vibe-coded and don't have customers to begin with
- skrebbel 3mo agoBun had customers?
- maxloh 3mo agoThis project is already highly vibe-coded. Claude is the second contributor of the repo.
- coneonthefloor 3mo ago
- awaseem 3mo agoI saw this on twitter and loved it, such a good move on your part Colin. Hope the project picks up tons of steam!
- ivanjermakov 3mo agoRespect for embracing existing tech instead of rewriting a worse version of it. Wonder where we would be today if all alternative-building effort went to Node instead (with proper leadership).
- hungryhobbit 3mo agoFundamentally you can't fix a lot of things with this approach. Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments"). When an organization digs into bad decisions, the only way to fix them is to start something new. The entire JS ecosystem will never have documentation on its config as long as everyone keeps building on top of Node. (And there are many other issues like this in the Node ecosystem; the utter absurdity of not being able to document config is just my personal pet peeve.)
- johnfn 3mo ago> Simple example: Node is the only serious OSS software I know of that has no way to document its config (in the config file itself). It's moronic! The Node people just adopted JSON without a thought, and then refused to consider any alternatives (even "JSON with comments"). Tangential but this also drives me absolutely nuts. If I have to see `"//": "some comment"` one more time I'm gonna lose it.
- colinmcd 3mo agoEDIT: Sorry, I understand you're talking about package.json. Would be fun to try to get the Node & package mgmt teams aligned to add support for comments in the package.json. Bun tried and failed to do this (requires ecosystem coordination). Nub could absolutely support a config file and use it to set NODE_OPTIONS or flags in the node child process. There's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater due to DX concerns like this. That's a key part of the concept Nub is trying to prove. (To be clear I'm quite content to conform to Node's no-config-file policy at the moment.)
- 3mo ago
- kandros 3mo agoLove the idea, learning a lot of interesting things about node hooks by reading docs and some code
- montroser 3mo agoNice. Can we get `nub --compile` up in there like Bun has?
- colinmcd 3mo agoComing very soon!
- allthetime 3mo agoI will seriously consider migrating once this exists! I couldn’t imagine deploying any other way now. I can never go back from SCPing a single binary to my server and just hitting reset on the service.
- eyelidlessness 3mo agoI’m surprised to see this using a `--require` hook (rather than `--import`). Maybe something’s changed significantly since I was looking into building some similar functionality… but it makes me wonder about nuances in nub’s ESM support. (When I was investigating this it was very early in Node’s `--import` story, but there were several edge cases with the more common ESM-to-CJS approaches that I wanted to address. Most were probably exceedingly niche concerns, but I’d expect top-level await to affect a meaningful subset of users.)
- colinmcd 3mo agoWe use this to register our preload purely for performance reasons. In this and many other cases CommonJS is still faster than ESM. Using --require is about 0.5ms overhead vs 4.6ms for --import (on my M1 Macbook Pro). Relatedly Node.js recently (2025) introduced a synchronous version of its resolver hook registration API (`module.registerHooks()`) specifically to improve performance over the old async `module.register()` API. It was a big unblocker for Nub. For the interested, the async API added 19ms fixed registration overhead + about 130us additional overhead per import. Which flag Nub uses here doesn't impact userland at all, TLA is supported wherever it's supported by Node.js itself.
- eyelidlessness 3mo agoThanks! From what you say here and what I see in the docs, it looks like everything is much simpler and more robust than when I was exploring the space. I’m happy to see that, and thrilled it’s mature enough now to support use cases like nub.
- skybrian 3mo ago> TypeScript-friendly resolution: extensionless imports, tsconfig.json#paths I’m wondering how that works. Deno has very complicated import resolution, so building my own import resolver to be compatible with it is a bit of a pain. (This is for a custom lint-like tool.)
- jpambrun 3mo agoAm I expected to be able to run this in production on the backend, or do I still need to transpile and bundle? Do we expect the performance and memory overhead to be negligible. What would be the expectations on terms of added attack surface?
- colinmcd 3mo agoRight now, you should use Nub on the backend if you are relying on its augmentations. If you specifically want to disable Nub's augmentations (so you have a guarantee that your app/script will "just work" with regular Node, there's a couple ways to disable it. NODE_COMPAT=0 nub index.ts nub --node index.ts I'll investigate a `nub build` that would do the transpilation upfront and properly chunk/bundle a prod build. It's a good idea. But yes, Nub's overhead (both time and space) is generally negligible relative to Node itself. Re: added attack surface: the most obvious one is that Nub loads .env files (same as Bun/Next/Vite) so be aware of that. All of Node's permission flags are passed through as well. I won't claim there's no additional attack surface, but it doesn't have much surface area, just a Rust wrapper that spawns `node` ultimately.
- BearOso 3mo agoI'm seeing lots of bots/agents misusing backticks like this. It's because people are writing agent plans in markdown and the agent thinks it's appropriate everywhere. Maybe you shouldn't be running all your comment replies through Claude.
- fartcoin67 3mo agoDude people have been doing this since long before LLMs. It's more an artifact of Slack than anything.
- BearOso 3mo agoSlack uses this? Thanks for the info. I've never been forced into Slack, so I wasn't aware of that. Either way, it's stupid to use in places it doesn't induce formatting.
- haburka 3mo agoI actually really like this! Great choices all around.
- Onavo 3mo agoThere's also the option of using Jiti https://github.com/unjs/jiti https://github.com/unjs/jiti It would add an extra dependency though
- pier25 3mo agoVery cool idea which makes a lot of sense. Bun provides more (eg db drivers) but the DX is certainly a big part of its appeal. For reference, the main author of Nub is Colin McDonnell who created Zod and even worked at Bun at some point.
- colinmcd 3mo agoIndeed, Nub intentionally introduces no Nub-specific APIs: no Nub global, no nub: prefixed built-in modules, no Nub-named config file / lockfile, no "nub" field in package.json, not even any NUB_ environment variables. Most of the stuff Bun added is better as a proper dependency imo.
- vmsp 3mo agoHasn't Node been able to run TypeScript for a couple of versions? Why's the transpiler needed?
- conartist6 3mo agoIt says "injects polyfills as needed for APIs like `Worker`, `Temporal`, etc"
- zamadatix 3mo agoNode's built-in Typescript support is just for type stripping. That works for a massive amount of TypeScript syntax, but not all of it. It also doesn't bother actually checking the types, just removing them so it runs. You also lose things like tsconfig. This looks to support both the built-in stripping as well as actual TypeScript.
- colinmcd 3mo agoExactly this. TypeScript also ended up being many users' entrypoint to JSX, decorators, etc as it became a catchall transpiler surface so respecting tsconfig is vital here (Node understandably has a policy against this). Plus there are extensionless imports, the "phantom" .js imports (pointing to .ts files), etc. List goes on. Type stripping ends up working out of the box for virtually no real world projects sadly. https://nubjs.com/docs/runtime/typescript https://nubjs.com/docs/runtime/typescript
- chirsz 3mo agoThe Node.js team removed `--experimental-transform-types` from Node.js v26. This makes native, full TypeScript support impossible. https://github.com/nodejs/typescript/issues/51#issuecomment-4421528927 https://github.com/nodejs/typescript/issues/51#issuecomment-...
- cozzyd 3mo agoI know some people who pronounce n00b like nub, which makes this sort of funny to me. (Maybe it's even intentional?)
- nsonha 3mo agowhat's wrong with bun? And how is this better?
- jitl 3mo agofor me it’s the segfaults. never had node segfault on me.
- zarzavat 3mo agoThis looks fantastic. One suggestion, for package management you should just wrap pnpm, my desire to move to anything else is nil.
- colinmcd 3mo agoYou can continue using pnpm if you want. Nub is a la carte. Nub's runtime or script runner functionality will work with any package manager that uses node_modules (actually Yarn PnP is also supported out of the box). You can also move over to Nub from pnpm incrementally if you want the performance or security wins. It has complete pnpm compatibility: flag for flag identical CLI, reads and writes from your pnpm-lock.yaml, and respects your expecting configs completely. Nub and pnpm can be used simultaneously by different teammates without lockfile churn. This is a key design goal, and its what I mean by "incrementally adoptable". But yeah `nub install` will almost certainly work in your repo out of the box. (File an issue otherwise.) https://nubjs.com/docs/install/pnpm https://nubjs.com/docs/install/pnpm Same is true for npm, yarn, and bun as well. It detects your current package manager (based on package.json#packageManager or lockfile existence) and runs in "compatibility mode" for that specific package manager. https://nubjs.com/docs/install#config-it-reads https://nubjs.com/docs/install#config-it-reads
- vivzkestrel 3mo ago- eli 5 : what is so great about this
- austin-cheney 3mo agoThe readme says Websockets support is native from Node 22, except Node does not have a native Websockets library. Their link for Websockets standard goes to MDN, which is fine except that only describes the WHATWG user interface and nothing about the protocol or how Websockets works. It feels like this is missing something or using a nonnative library as a supplemental addition.
- soulofmischief 3mo agoNode supports a built-in WebSocket client since 22, but not a server.
- austin-cheney 3mo agoIn that case I guess this would be much more a Node complaint. I did find this page: https://nodejs.org/learn/getting-started/websocket https://nodejs.org/learn/getting-started/websocket It is under the site's learn tab, but never mentioned in the API/library documentation. It's also weird because the only difference between a WebSocket client and server is that a server is a connection listener that responds to the handshake. The client is responsible for absolutely everything else: send messages, receive messages, initiate the connection, kill the connection, ping/pong. After the client accepts the server's handshake response the server becomes the other client performing exactly the same functionality. Node could have been doing that all along since adding client support.
- eezing 3mo ago[dead]
- keks0r 3mo agoDoes this mean, that the full node compatibility purely depends on oxc for transpiling? So oxc compatibility = nub compatibility?
- BrunoBernardino 3mo agoThis is _very_ interesting, thanks for building and sharing it, Colin! I've got a couple of decent-sized products running on Deno (and I've been a fan since it came out, not so much since 1.0 and 2.0, but still feel it's better than Node), but Node has been catching up and Deno has slowed down, so this might be the "compatibility middleware" that'll get me to move things back to Node. Will keep a close eye on it.
- farid_mth 3mo ago[flagged]
- Reuben_Santoso 3mo agoI dont completely get it yet. but I like it when things run faster ;)
- sgammon 2mo agolove this, and the name "nub" is conceptually perfect (1) adopts existing tech and improves, rather than a greenfield project with worse compat (2) the way it uses existing node mechanisms to implement itself (+oxc) is very smart (3) i like that the node.js-forever crowd has a way to use the newest stuff