Native require and dynamic modules

Since Nodepack uses Webpack to compile your code, by default all require calls will use Webpack own internal require implementation. Most of the time this is fine but in some use cases you want to use Node's native require implementation. For example, your app has a plugin system that should be able to load modules dynamically in the user project.

To use native require and other native Node modules utilities, install @nodepack/module:

yarn add @nodepack/module

Then you can access the native Node require API:

import { nativeRequire } from '@nodepack/module'

nativeRequire('./some-module')

This package also comes with useful utilities to dynamically resolve or load modules.

Resolve a module

import { resolveModule } from '@nodepack/module'

const request = 'some-module/ui.js'
const cwd = '/home/user/some-project'

const modulePath = resolveModule(request, cwd)

Note that this will automatically use a fallback if you are using an old version of Node that doesn't support require.resolve.

Load a module dynamically

import { loadModule } from '@nodepack/module'

const request = 'some-module/ui.js'
const cwd = '/home/user/some-project'
const clearModuleCache = true

const moduleExports = loadModule(request, cwd, clearModuleCache)

Clear a module from Node cache

import { clearModule } from '@nodepack/module'

const request = 'some-module/ui.js'
const cwd = '/home/user/some-project'

clearModule(request, cwd)

Other utilities

import {
  mayBeNodeModule,
  isRelative,
  isAbsolute
} from '@nodepack/module'

// Checks if module could be a node_modules package
console.log(mayBeNodeModule('chalk'))

// Checks if module request is a relative module
console.log(isRelative('./some-js-module'))

// Checks if module request is an absolute module
console.log(isAbsolute('/home/user/some-project/src/some-js-module'))