Fixing NodeJS Intl.DateTimeFormat not formatting properly for locales

Symptom:

NodeJS starting from version v9.x supports the ES6 Intl.DateTimeFormat

When you use it with the ‘en-US’ locale, it works properly and prints "August 13, 2018":

const df = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', {day: 'numeric', month: 'long', year: 'numeric', timeZone: 'UTC'});
console.log(df.format(new Date("2018-08-13T04:00:00.000Z")));

However, using it with a different locale fails:

const df = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('de', {day: 'numeric', month: 'long', year: 'numeric', timeZone: 'UTC'});
console.log(df.format(new Date("2018-08-13T04:00:00.000Z")));

While you would expect this to print "13. August 2018" , it will print "2018 M08 13"

Reason:

By default, NodeJS is only built with small-icu support, thereby only installing the en-US locale in order to reduce the installation filesize.

Solution 1 (preferred):

You can use the intl polyfill module to completely replace NodeJS’s implementation of intl:

Installation:

npm i --save intl

Usage:

// Replace Intl by polyfill
Intl = require("intl")

const df = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('de', {day: 'numeric', month: 'long', year: 'numeric', timeZone: 'UTC'});
console.log(df.format(new Date("2018-08-13T04:00:00.000Z")));

This will print 13. August 2018 as expected.

Solution 2 (alternate):

You can use the full-icu package to continue using the NodeJS ICU implementation (i.e. no polyfill), but just install the ICU data.

While this reduces the total installation filesize, installation is slow and the exact method depends on the NodeJS version and requires more work than just using the intl polyfill.

In order to install, use

npm i --save full-icu

This will take some time to compile the data and then will print instructions like this:

 √ icudt62l.dat (link)
Node will use this ICU datafile if the environment variable NODE_ICU_DATA is set to “node_modules/full-icu”
or with node --icu-data-dir=node_modules/full-icu YOURAPP.js
 For package.json:
{"scripts":{"start":"node --icu-data-dir=node_modules/full-icu YOURAPP.js"}}

By the way, if you have full data, running this in node:
> new Intl.DateTimeFormat('es',{month:'long'}).format(new Date(9E8));
... will show “enero”. If it shows “January” you don't have full data.
News: Please see https://github.com/icu-project/full-icu-npm/issues/6

In order to actually use full-icu, you need to use the --icu-data-dir=node_modules/full-icu argument every time you run node. In order to run node interactively, use

node --icu-data-dir=node_modules/full-icu

If you use scripts in your application (e.g. the start script, i.e. what gets executed if you run npm start), you need to adjust the configuration in package.json:

Instead of

// [...]
"scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
}
// [...]

use

// [...]
"scripts": {
    "start": "node --icu-data-dir=node_modules/full-icu index.js"
}
// [...]

Depending on your application, you might need to use a different script name than index.js – common names include server.js and start.js