We are looking into implementing STREAM.IO Chat functionality. As per System Requirements, we have to use the latest Node.js which is 12.16.3.
In our production environment we still have Node.js 8.1. My questions is;
Node 8 is an End of Life release, or in other words, no longer officially supported. For security reasons I'd recommend upgrading your production instance to Node 12. There are few breaking changes between those versions of Node.js, so I wouldn't expect problems performing such an upgrade. The only exception to that is if your code or its deps are hooking directly into native dependencies like V8 or NAN. See this blog post on upgrading from Node 8 for more info on that.
You can also check node.green for version support details, and the official Node site for supported releases.
Running an EoL Node version in production is not a great idea, and opens up vulnerabilities for no reason when the upgrade path is so simple.
