Any plan to support node ESM?

I’m submitting a…

• Bug report
• Feature request
• Question

Current behavior

The default generated migrations are all CJS files and can not be used in a ESM node project (type="module" in package.json).

It seems that node-db-migrate hardcoded the .js suffix. If I change the migration files extension to .cjs, it can’t recognize them at all.

Expected behavior

Provide an option to generate ESM migration code or recognize .cjs migration files.

Environment

db-migrate version: 1.0.0-beat.14
plugins with versions: none
db-migrate driver with versions: sqlite3 0.4.0

Additional information:
- Node version: 15.5.0
- Platform:  Mac

[joeldenning]

Just introducing the word import anywhere in the code will break it for thousands of users

Adding an unused import() does not throw an error in any LTS versions of NodeJS, starting with Node 10. Does db-migrate support node@9? That’s the latest version of Node that throws an error when it sees a dynamic import() in a file. I see that the package.json says that node >= 8 is supported on the master branch for version 1.0.0-beta.14 - if that’s true then yes it would be a breaking change.

wouldn’t mind to introduce it if it brings any benefit

The main benefit I see is not throwing errors when users have set "type": "module" in their package.json. “Don’t use ES Modules” is an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction to place on users.

Alternative solution

Another solution would be to generate migration js files with the .cjs extension when inside of a package that has "type": "module", and then have db-migrate look for either .js or .cjs when calling require(). This solution would work in Node 8 as far as I know, so it could be a good solution if backwards compatibility with Node 8 is needed.

[joeldenning]

👍🏿 I’ve created #724 which addresses this for the 1.x beta versions.