babel-plugin-bridge v0.0.1

🌉 Bridge

A bundler that bridges the gap to browser-optimized JavaScript bundling with native browser ES Modules (ESM).

Installation

npm install --save babel-preset-bridge

In any Babel-powered JavaScript project, add bridge to your .babelrc:

{
  "presets": ["bridge"]
}

When you transform your files normally, via webpack or the Babel CLI, this will transform all your absolute NPM imports from absolute…

import React from 'react';

…to relative imports, depending on the file that imported it.

import React from '../../node_modules/react@16.6.0/index.js';

This will also tree-shake your Node Modules, and copy them to a node_modules folder in your Babel’s compile directory folder (⚠️ Important: this will need to be set in order for this plugin to work).

Options

{
  "alias": {
    "react": "react/cjs/react.development.js"
  },
  "sourceMaps": false
}

CommonJS Support

This doesn’t support CommonJS (CJS).

You’ll know you’re trying to load a CJS module if it’s using require(). You’ll probably get an error that looks like this:

Uncaught ReferenceError: require is not defined

Instead, you’ll either have to load the ESM version that the library ships, assuming it does, or switch to use another package that supports ESM.

Say by default you’re used to declaring:

import myModule from 'my-module';

Also say that my-module loaded the CJS by default, but shipped an ESM version under my-module/esm. Without touching your project, configure Bridge to handle that for you:

{
  "presets": [
    [
      "bridge",
      {
        "alias": {
          "my-module": "my-module/ejs"
        }
      }
    ]
  ]
}

In your project, you can still keep writing import … from 'my-module' but at compile time it will load the version from alias.

ES Module Support

If your preferred NPM package doesn’t export ESM, ask its maintainer(s)! Many packages such as React are already working on this, and if the project uses Rollup as its bundler, exporting ESM is as simple as adding one line to the config.

Because shipping ESM should be a decision of each NPM module (not to mention converting CJS → ESM is muuuuch more difficult than ESM → CJS), this project can’t support automatic conversion at this time.