Upgrade to Node JS v20

[Nana-EC]

Problem

The relay currently uses node version 18 which has an end of life at the end of April 2025

Solution

Upgrade to the latest LTS version which is currently v20

• Update reference of v18 to latest LTS v20
• Run complete acceptance test suite on HTTP server
• Run complete acceptance test suite on WS server
• Confirm CI jobs run
• Run DApp Tests
• Run Smart contract repo test suites
• Run perf tests and measure an deltas
• Deploy an alpha and confirm in previewnet

Alternatives

Make a consideration for v22.5.1 as it was recently identified as a pinned version of nodejs for the ethers library. Something to check

[ebadiere]

Node version 22 contains some changes of interest. Most notable are:

• Running package.json scripts

Node.js 22 includes a new experimental feature for the execution of scripts from the package.json with the cli flag node --run . It also supports node --run test which executes the test command inside package.json scripts.

Contributed by Yagiz Nizipli #52190

• WebSocket
  The browser-compatible implementation of WebSocket, previously behind the flag --experimental-websocket, will be enabled by default. This provides a WebSocket client to Node.js without external dependencies.

Contributed by the Undici team and Aras Abbasi in #51594

• glob and globSync

This release adds to the node:fsmodule the functions glob and globSync for pattern matching. Developers can now utilize these functions for matching file paths based on specified patterns.

Contributed by Moshe Atlow #51912

Node Release v22.5.1 contains a fix to a regression introduced in 22.5.0

A separate issue should be opened to upgrade to this version in the relay.

[Nana-EC]

Verified by @ebadiere with note to consider upgrade to v22.5.0 in future