How to get --unhandled-rejections=strict working (Node.js)

Node.js has a CLI option called --unhandled-rejections=strict, which causes the script to completely fail instead of just throwing a warning when a JavaScript promise runs into an error.

I wanted this option turned on because I wanted my Netlify build script to completely fail if a promise rejected, so that the deployment wouldn’t finish successfully (despite the error) and publish a broken site.

At first, I tried doing it like this:

node build.js --unhandled-rejections=strict

but that didn’t work.

To get it to work, I had to put the --unhandled-rejections=strict before the name of the Node.js script:

node --unhandled-rejections=strict build.js

Putting it in this order, the CLI argument works and a rejected promise now causes the script to stop running.