The --inspect flag and protocol were introduced in Node 6.3.0, primarily because the V8 engine had changed the debugging protocol. In Node 6.2.0 and down, there's a legacy debugging protocol enabled with the --debug flag, but this isn't compatible with the native Chrome Devtools UI.

Instead, we can use the node-inspector tool, as a client for the legacy protocol.

The node-inspector tool essentially wraps an older version of Devtools that interfaces with the legacy debug API, and then hosts it locally.

Let's install node-inspector:

$ npm i -g node-inspector

This will add a global executable called node-debug, which we can use as shorthand to start our process in debug mode.

If we could run our process like so:

$ node-debug index.js

We should see output that's something like the following:

Node Inspector v0.12.10
Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/?port=5858 to start debugging.
Debugging `index.js`
    
Debugger listening on [::]:5858

When we load the URL http://127.0.0.1:8080/?port=5858 in our browser we'll again see the familiar Devtools interface.

By default, the node-debug command start our process in a paused state. After pressing run (the blue play button), we should now be able to follow the main recipe in it's entirely using a legacy version of Node.