Alias & relative imports with importmap: requires prefix

[Pictor13]

I'm getting crazy with import_map.json, bare-specifiers and aliases.
I manage to make the import-map work correctly only for remote URLs, but not for aliases in order to manage relative paths.

The purpose is to define prefixes/aliases so that I do not have to track changes to relative import paths, if I move files around directories.

Hence my map is:

{
    "imports": {
      "/": "./",                  // all absolute imports relative to import-map
      "./": "./",                 // all relative imports relative to import-map
      "domain": "./_domain/",
      "app/": "./_app/",
      "infra/": "./_app/infrastructure/",
      "db/": "infra/adapter/database/"
    }
  }

I notice several problems here:

• if I do an import from "/some/path/file.ts", Deno insist reading the / as Operative-System root (on Ubuntu); even though I aliased / with ./ (import-map folder)
• if I do an import from "app/some/dependency.ts", Deno tells me that

  Relative import path "app/some/dependency.ts" not prefixed with / or ./ or ../ (resolve error)

I'm in a loop, cause I want to define aliases to not specify full paths:

• but Deno wants me to prefix them with /
• but at the same time it ignores the / remapping nad insists reading them from the system root folder.
• the Deno Runtime and VSCode Deno extension seem to have some differences in how they read import statements.
  My VSCode was showing no problems anymore in the whole codebase; but when running deno run on the code I'm getting a lot of broken imports (with the problems above) and all these inconsistencies in interpreting the import-map.

How to fix my import setup ❓

The documentation online is so limited on the topic. The examples shown in most of the Q&A on stack-overflow or other resources are always a bout very basic use cases, they mostly are copy-pastes from the official docue, and they do not go deep into explaining how the import-maps work.

Also I think it is pretty unclear and undocumented whether aliases can be reused inside other aliases/specifiers.
For example I'm not sure if the last specifier "db/": "infra/adapter/database/" is legit or if it impossible to do so. ❓ Also, probably this would have consequences, when remapping /, given that the slash is used in all the import-map paths as a separator. ❓

I'm obviously misunderstanding something; please help me to figure out what. Otherwise I suspect there is a bug; but I guess there would already be lot of issues open if that would be the case (I searched other issues, and couldn't find a solution).

---

OS: Ubuntu 20.04
Deno:

$ deno --version
deno 1.34.1 (release, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
v8 11.5.150.2
typescript 5.0.4

VSCode: 1.79.2
VSCode extension: latest version

[evelant]

I also ran into this, it's quite an irritating bug. Using Deno vscode in a monorepo is painful/impossible but unfortunately it looks like issues for the common repo configurations haven't seen any movement in months, they got shifted from q3 plan to q4 plan.

[nayeemrmn]

Seems like the import_map.json wasn't included in configuration. Rename it to deno.json, it should be detected now even if not in the root directory.

[Pictor13]

Pictor13 wrote:

I manage to make the import-map work correctly only for remote URLs, but not for aliases in order to manage relative paths.

As written, the import-map is detected; it's the content that isn't interpreted as expected.

[..] import_map.json [..] Rename it to deno.json [..]

But... they are different files, aren't they? One is Deno config and the other is the Import config.
Also deno.json isn't a mandatory file (at least, it wasn't in June'23; I didn't touch Deno since about 6 months)