# expressots-cli: what changed from 3 to 4

- Product: expressots-cli (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/expressots-cli)
- Vendor: expressots-cli
- Range: changelog entries numbered after 3.0.0 up to and including v4.0.0, stable releases only
- Entries below: 1 release (newest first)
- Resolved: 3 is 3.0.0 and 4 is v4.0.0, the newest stable release of each major we track
- Carrying security changes: 0 · CVEs mentioned: 0 · Mentioning breaking changes: 1 · Removing or deprecating something: 1
- Page: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/expressots-cli/compare/3...4

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

## What changed (6 changes, grouped by kind)

### Added

#### v4.0.0 (2026-07-17)

- Support for environment variable EXPRESSOTS_TEMPLATE_REF to override template reference

### Changed

#### v4.0.0 (2026-07-17)

- expressots new scaffolds from the expressots/templates#v4.0.0 tag, so the CLI and templates always move together
- Enable strictNullChecks
- Implement deterministic template-ref resolution with tested degit invocation
- Node.js >= 20.19.0 required

### Removed

#### v4.0.0 (2026-07-17)

- Remove unused dependencies and decorator flags

## Release notes

### v4.0.0 — @expressots/cli 4.0.0

- Date: 2026-07-17
- Version: v4.0.0
- Original notes: https://github.com/expressots/expressots-cli/releases/tag/v4.0.0
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/expressots-cli/releases/v4.0.0

- **changed** — expressots new scaffolds from the expressots/templates#v4.0.0 tag, so the CLI and templates always move together
- **added** — Support for environment variable EXPRESSOTS_TEMPLATE_REF to override template reference
- **changed** — Enable strictNullChecks
- **removed** — Remove unused dependencies and decorator flags
- **changed** — Implement deterministic template-ref resolution with tested degit invocation
- **changed** — Node.js >= 20.19.0 required

ExpressoTS CLI 4.0.0 — stable release.

`expressots new` scaffolds from the `expressots/templates#v4.0.0` tag, so the CLI and templates always move together (override with `EXPRESSOTS_TEMPLATE_REF`).

##### Highlights

- Project scaffolding (application, application-with-events via `-e`, micro), generators for every v4 schematic, dev server, containerize, CI/CD, OpenAPI emit, cost estimates
- `strictNullChecks` enabled; unused dependencies and decorator flags removed
- Deterministic template-ref resolution with tested degit invocation

##### Breaking changes

- Node.js >= 20.19.0 required

Full details in [CHANGELOG.md](https://github.com/expressots/expressots-cli/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md).