Switch to ESM

[ahmadbilaldev]

Change the module from CommonJS to ECMAScript Module (ESM). Some JS Frameworks support ESM now and importing CommonJS modules may get complicated.

[k2snowman69]

Just to clarify here... there's two ESM related things that are possible here:

1. Switch this package to use ESM so that it's package.json contains type: module
2. Update this package so that it doesn't assume all packages can be require-ed in since node will freak out if you require an ESM npm package

Which of these were you describing with this ticket?

[dobromyslov]

I'm trying to buld Google cloud functions with webpack with enabled ESM. But external modules added with webpack-node-externals are commonjs by default and webpack compiles them as:

/***/ "pino":
/*!***********************!*\
  !*** external "pino" ***!
  \***********************/
/***/ ((module) => {

module.exports = require("pino");

/***/ }),

As you can see webpack is dumb and uses require even if it's configured to output ESM module. What webpack-node-externals options should I set to tell webpack that all externals should be imported as ES modules?

[dobromyslov]

Used webpack-node-externals option importType: 'module' to pack my project with ESM support. More details are here: https://github.com/nrwl/nx/issues/7872#issuecomment-997460397

[stevemarksd]

importType: 'module' should be added to @types.

[cbix]

We'd like to use some CJS dependencies (e.g. lodash) and some ESM-only ones (like d3). Now my issue is that neither of the importType options work for us. When using the default importType: 'commonjs' I'm getting

module.exports = require("d3");
^

ReferenceError: require is not defined in ES module scope, you can use import instead

and with importType: 'module':

console.log((0,lodash__WEBPACK_IMPORTED_MODULE_2__.reverse)([(0,_util__WEBPACK_IMPORTED_MODULE_0__["default"])(), d3__WEBPACK_IMPORTED_MODULE_1__.scaleLinear().domain([3, 6])(4)]));
                                                           ^

TypeError: (0 , lodash__WEBPACK_IMPORTED_MODULE_2__.reverse) is not a function

Without webpack-node-externals I can run the bundle without issues. Any ideas what do do in this case except downgrading the ESM-only packages to older, unsupported versions with CJS support?

[sdavids]

Webpack 5 supports ESM format for configurations

[errorx666]

@cbix I worked around the issue with this code:

	importType: function( request ) {
		if( request === '@errorx666/query' ) {
			return `module ${request}`;
		} else {
			return `node-commonjs ${request}`;
		}
	}

More properly, the code should probably check package.json for type: module.