Commander 15 is ESM only. This is expected to be seamless for ESM consumers, but some CommonJS consumers may hit issues with tooling requiring configuration for ESM-only dependencies. See Migration Tips below.
The release of Commander 15 in May 2026 will move Commander 14 into maintenance. Commander 14 will get security updates for
12 months (to May 2027). For more info see Release Policy.
Added
- show excess command-arguments in error message (#2384)
Fixed
- Breaking: only lone
--no-*option sets default option value totrue, default not implicitly set when define both positive and negative option in either order (#2405) - update example to use compatible character for MINGW64 (#2475)
Changed
- Breaking: migrated Commander implementation from CommonJS to ESM (#2464)
- Breaking: Commander 15 requires Node.js v22.12.0 or higher (for
require(esm)). - dev: switch tests from Jest to
node:testtest runner (#2463)
Deleted
- Breaking: removed deprecated export of
commander/esm.mjs(#2464)
Migration Tips
Commander 15 is ESM only, but this does not mean you need to migrate to ESM to use it. Importing ESM from CommonJS is
supported by Node.js, and Bun, and Deno. Hopefully it Just Works for you! However, you may be using a different runtime or
some other part of your setup that may not yet natively support importing ESM from CommonJS, such as your testing framework
or bundler.
If you have problems using Commander 15 in your environment, one option is stay on Commander 14 for now. Commander 14 will
get security updates until May 2027 and things will hopefully improve for your setup in the meantime.
To allow require(esm) from CommonJS you may be able to make small changes to your current setup. Some
examples for Jest are included in examples/using-esm-from-commonjs.
(Commander was using Jest, so we have a special interest.)