Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

Poor CommonJS experience

See original GitHub issue

Describe the bug

Many projects don’t have the option of switching wholesale over to ESM, and must use CommonJS. This will probably be true for the foreseeable future, as CommonJS will be here to stay for at least five years.

It’s pretty difficult to tease out how to use this package with CommonJS, there are no docs or mention of it anywhere.

The best I can come up with to make it work is something like:

const module = await import('@keycloak/keycloak-admin-client');
const KcAdminClient = module.default.default;

I was only able to figure this out after putting breakpoints on and inspecting the module - it’s strange to have to do .default.default

Is there a way to improve the developer experience with CommonJS?

Version

18.0.0

Expected behavior

No response

Actual behavior

No response

How to Reproduce?

No response

Anything else?

No response

Issue Analytics

State:
Created a year ago
Comments:6 (3 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

7reactions

jonkoopscommented, May 23, 2022

We are currently compiling this package in the CommonJS format, the quirkiness we are seeing here is a side-effect of the TypeScript compiler. Now that Node.js 12 is no longer supported we intend to compile to ESM instead.

There are no intentions to have this package contain both ESM and CommonJS entry points and we’d rather opt for a pure ESM package instead. Node.js provides interoperability between these two so that it should ‘just work’ so I expect this will improve the developer experience.

0reactions

claytongulickcommented, Sep 8, 2022

No, it’s not.

Are you sure? https://antfu.me/posts/publish-esm-and-cjs

I’ve bundled for both without any major issues.

Top Results From Across the Web

Disadvantage of ES6 and CommonJS export convention

Babel will use module.exports as default export if the imported module is CommonJS, so I don't see how module.exports.default = Struct helps. Do ......

Annoyed by the schism between CommonJS and ESM - Reddit

The arguments there are all weak. "It is risky" is only true if you use typescript wrong or use weird libraries. Most important...

Default Exports in JavaScript Modules Are Terrible

In this article, I want to explain why default exports are a poor practice and lead to a worse developer experience. Consider an...

ES modules are terrible - Hacker News

As an exercise, try to write a static analyser that simply ignores dynamic imports and just outputs a dependency graph of your static...

Simon Høiberg on Twitter: "JavaScript Tip Avoid default ...

JavaScript Tip Avoid default exports. You will get a better developer experience, especially if you're using TypeScript. If you're using CommonJS, ...