NLnet Grant Milestone 1.a – SolidOS Backend Update

September 2025 marks the official start of our NLnet Grant work. We're kicking off with Milestone 1.a, focusing on backend development. The SolidOS codebase had outdated dependencies and numerous vulnerabilities. This milestone addresses those issues and prepares everything for the upcoming new UI.

About SolidOS

SolidOS consists of around 13 active repositories, all of which required updates. We divided the Milestone 1.a work into three main areas:

• Update to Node 20
• Update all dependencies and fix vulnerabilities
• Update Inrupt authentication library

Update to Node 20

Although the official work started in September, development began back in August. The codebase was previously running on Node 18, which needed to be sunset. Now, everything runs on Node 20, reflected in all CI/CD actions.
GitHub issue: #219

Update all dependencies and fix vulnerabilities

All 13 repositories have similar production and development dependencies. They build one on top of another: it starts with solid-logic, which is used by pane-registry, which in turn is used by solid-ui, and so on.
GitHub issue: #221

Update Inrupt authn library

A long-awaited update was for the @inrupt/solid-client-authn-browser dependency in solid-logic. We upgraded it from 1.17 to 3.1.0 (the latest as of September 2025). This work spanned multiple repositories.
GitHub issue: #223

And finally...