Please use this ticket to provide feedback on our native ESM support. Your involvement is greatly appreciated to ensure the feature works on real-world projects.
Experimental warningNode's loader hooks are EXPERIMENTAL and subject to change. ts-node's ESM support is as stable as it can be, but it relies on APIs which node can and will break in new versions of node.
When node breaks their APIs, it breaks loaders using their APIs. You have been warned!
Third-party docs: "Guide: ES Modules in NodeJS"Someone has been maintaining a great reference document explaining how to use ts-node's ESM loader.
First-party docsOur website explains the basics:
CommonJS vs native ECMAScript modules
Options: esm
"module": "ESNext"
or "ES2015"
so that TypeScript emits import/export syntax."type": "module"
in your package.json
, which is required to tell node that .js files are ESM instead of CommonJS. To be compatible with editors, the compiler, and the TypeScript ecosystem, we cannot name our source files .mts
nor .mjs
.import
statements, or pass --experimental-specifier-resolution=node
Idiomatic TypeScript should import foo.ts
as import 'foo.js';
TypeScript understands this.
ts-node-esm ./my-script.ts ts-node --esm ./my-script.ts # If you add "esm": true to your tsconfig, you can omit the CLI flag ts-node ./my-script.ts # If you must invoke node directly, pass --loader node --loader ts-node/esm ./my-script.ts # To force the use of a specific tsconfig.json, use the TS_NODE_PROJECT environment variable TS_NODE_PROJECT="path/to/tsconfig.json" node --loader ts-node/esm ./my-script.ts # To install the loader into a node-based CLI tool, use NODE_OPTIONS NODE_OPTIONS='--loader ts-node/esm' greeter --config ./greeter.config.ts sayhello
ts-node-esm
/ --esm
/ "esm": true
work by spawning a subprocess and passing it the --loader
flag.
When running ts-node --esm
, ts-node-esm
, or ts-node
all CLI flags and configuration are parsed as normal. However, when passing --loader ts-node/esm
, the following limitations apply:
tsconfig.json
is parsed.ts-node
must be installed locally, not globally. npm install ts-node
or yarn add ts-node
.tsconfig will be resolved relative to process.cwd()
or to TS_NODE_PROJECT
. Specify ts-node options in your tsconfig file. For details, see our docs.
Use TS_NODE_PROJECT
to tell ts-node to use a specific tsconfig, and put all ts-node options into this config file.
As long as node's APIs are experimental, all changes to ESM support in ts-node, including breaking changes, will be released as minor or patch versions, NOT major versions. This conforms to semantic versioning's philosophy for version numbers lower than 1.0. Stable features will continue to be versioned as normal.
node's API change: v16.12.0, v17.0.0Node made a breaking change in their ESM API in version 17, backported to 16.12.0. It may also be backported to 14 and 12.
This is the change: nodejs/node#37468
ts-node automatically supports both APIs, thanks to #1457. This relies on hard-coded version number checks. If/when this is backported to node 14 and 12, we will publish a new version of ts-node with the appropriate version number checks. Be sure you are always using the latest version of ts-node to avoid problems.
Note: things below this line may be out-of-date or inaccurate. These notes were used during initial implementation, but have not been updated since
Pending development workprocess.argv
for config resolution?require('ts-node').esmImport(module, 'import-path')
Below is the official proposal, explaining our implementation in detail.
I am asking node's modules team questions here: nodejs/modules#351
I was reading the threads about ESM support in ts-node, e.g. #935.
The @K-FOSS/TS-ESNode implementation is unfortunately incomplete; it does not attempt to typecheck. (it uses transpileModule)
So I did some research. Below is a proposal for ESM support in ts-node
, describing the required behavior in detail.
This doesn't feel like an urgent feature to me, but I like having an official proposal we can work on.
Usagenode --loader ts-node/esm ./entrypoint.ts
Cannot be invoked as ts-node
because it requires node flags; hooks cannot be enabled at runtime. This is unavoidable.
For simplicity, --require ts-node/register
can be eliminated, because ts-node/esm
automatically does that.
Alternatively, we publish an experimental ts-node-esm
entry-point which invokes a node
subprocess.
Don't forget allowJs
! Affects the treatment of .js
files. (Not .mjs
nor .cjs
because the TS language service won't look at them)
Must implement ESM hooks to resolve extensionless imports to .ts files, resolve .js to .ts, classify .ts(x) and .jsx files as CJS or MJS, and compile .ts(x) and .jsx files.
resolve()
hook:
Match additional file extensions: .ts
, .tsx
, .jsx
.
Resolve .ts
, .tsx
, and .jsx
if the import specifier says .js
. Obey preferTsExts when doing this.
_
[Good idea?] Always ask default resolver first. If it finds something, we should not interfere.
--experimental-specifier-resolution=node
does not obey require.extensions
, unfortunately, so we can't use that.
getFormat
hook:
If the resolved file is .ts
, .tsx
, or .jsx
, behave as if extension was .js
: use node's package.json
discovery behavior to figure out if ESM or CJS.
This can be accomplished by appending .js
to the URL path and delegating to built-in getFormat
hook.
transformSource
hook:
Same as today's code transformer. Relies on projects to be configured correctly for import
/export
emit.
require()
hook
getFormat
logic to determine if node will treat file as CJS or ESM.require.resolve
points to a .ts
file, we need to make the determination.require()
code transform
import()
calls.require('ts-node').esmImport(module, 'import-path')
?ts-node
bin entry-point
ts-node
CLI does NOT need to support import()
ing ESM.
WHY? Because ESM hooks are an experimental feature which must be enabled via node CLI flag.
Thus we will be loaded via --require
, and Node is responsible for loading the entry-point, either triggering our hook or our require.extensions
.
import()
in CJS
If "module": "commonjs"
, compiler transforms import()
into __importStar
No way to change this without a custom transformer, which IMO is too much complexity at this time.
Users should run their code as ESM.
If they can't do that, we can recommend the following workaround:
// This is in a CommonJS file:
const dynamicallyImportedEsmModule = await require('ts-node').importESM('./specifier-of-esm-module', module);
Emit considerations
NOTE we have not implemented the following, although initially I thought we might. Instead, we assume tsconfig is configured for either ESM or CJS as needed
We could intelligently emit both "module": "esnext"
and "module": "commonjs"
depending on the classification of a file.
In transpile-only
mode this is simple. Call transpileModule
with different options.
When typechecking, we can pull SourceFile
ASTs from the language service / incremental compiler.
We'll need a second compiler, one for each emit format. Or we can hack it by using transpileModule
for all ESM output. transpileModule
is incompatible with certain kinds of TS code, (can't do const enums) but it might work for a first-pass implementation.
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