Requirements

Runtime

The engine does all date-time work through the Temporal API (ES2026) and references the global Temporal object — it ships no polyfill of its own.

• Node.js 26 or newer has Temporal built in.
• Browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Edge ship Temporal natively. For runtimes without it (Safari stable, older Node.js), your application installs a polyfill once — see Installation.

When Temporal is missing, the first call into the library throws an error that points at the polyfill instead of failing somewhere deep inside.

Module format

ESM only. Browsers load ESM natively, and Node.js 22 and newer can require() a synchronous ESM module graph — one free of top-level await, which this package is — from CommonJS code, so CommonJS applications on the supported Node.js versions are not excluded.

Runtime dependencies

None. The package requires nothing but the runtime itself.

The engine is pure: it reads a document, answers questions about it, and writes it back out. It executes no jobs, opens no connections, and persists no state, so there is nothing for a dependency to do. Keeping the requirement empty means the package can sit in any application without pulling a tree of its own behind it.

TypeScript

TypeScript is optional — the package is plain ESM and works from JavaScript as it is. For TypeScript users: Temporal is not yet part of a versioned lib entry, so enable it explicitly in your tsconfig.json until it lands in es2026:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "lib": ["es2025", "esnext.temporal"]
  }
}

Timezone data

Interpretation follows the timezone declared in the document, resolved against the timezone database available to your runtime (the ICU data of Node.js, or the browser’s own). Whether a zone name exists, and where its transitions fall, is therefore a property of the host rather than of the document. Keeping the runtime current is what keeps the timezone data current.