Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out.
Render doesn’t utilise buildpacks like Heroku. We do offer Native Environments which allows you to get up and running with your chosen language without having to “Dockerize” your app.
Node is available as part of the build and deploy of all Native Environments, listed (along with the other packages) in the docs linked above.
Where buildpacks have expectations/conventions/“magic”, Render leaves that down to you do decide how your app is built. You do this by setting the Build Command with the command(s) required to get your app built, e.g. npm install; npm build; pip install -r requirements.txt;. Or, you can make that a little more tidy, by creating a shell script in your repo with your required build steps and reference that in the Build Command, e.g. ./render-build.sh.
Python version’s can be set with the PYTHON_VERSION environment variable, and the Node included on Native Environments can be set with engines.node attribute in your package.json.
However, if you require even more customization, like OS-level packages that aren’t already part of our Native Environments, that’s when you’d need to look into Dockerizing your app.
Hope that helps, please let us know if you have any more questions.
Kind regards
Alan