Girl, by Vitória (my 6-year-old niece)
Girl, by Vitória (my 6-year-old niece)

Intro

Node has had experimental ES6 modules support for a few versions. It was possible to use such feature if files had the extension .mjs. With the release of Node.js 12 (2019-04-23), it is now also possible to import and export modules with either the .js extension, or no extension at all.

Let’s see a quick setup example to get ES6 import/export working with Node.js 12 in a way that it does not require the file extension.

The Example modules

Suppose our module has something like this:

// log.js
const log = console.log.bind(console);
const info = console.info.bind(console);

export { info };
export default log;

Note the ES6 export instead of Node.js’ CommonJS module.exports syntax.

Then, some other file imports the log helper.

// main.js
import log from './log';
import { info } from './log';

log('log, default export/import works!');
info('info, named export/import works too!');

Note we used ES6 import instead of Node.js’ CommonJS require syntax and we did not specify any file extension!

package.json

Now, in order for us to be able to run it successfully (with Node.js 12), we need fiddle with package.json. It needs to contain a field called type with the value module:

package.json file:

{
  "name": "es6-example-node12",
  "type": "module",
}

The Command Line options

And finally we can invoke node with some specific options:

node \
  --experimental-modules \
  --es-module-specifier-resolution=node \
  main.js

The --experimental-modules option makes Node accept import/export statements. But it requires that we use either the .mjs or the .js extension when importing modules. Thankfully, we can make use of the --es-module-specifier-resolution set to node and Node.js will accept imports without extension.

With all setup and the command line properly crafted, you’ll get an output like this:

(node:13058) ExperimentalWarning: The ESM module loader is experimental.
log, default export/import works!
info, named export/import works too!

We get the warning about the experimental feature, but other than that, everything is fine.

Would you rather not see that warning all the time? Just add --no-warnings to the command line:

node \
  --no-warnings \
  --experimental-modules \
  --es-module-specifier-resolution=node \
  main.js

Of course, we could create a shell alias:

alias es6mod='\
  node \
  --no-warnings \
  --experimental-modules \
  --es-module-specifier-resolution=node'

And then simply run the project or file with the alias:

es6mod main.js

Perhaps better yet, we could add the command line to the script section of package.json, like the start script in the example:

{
  "name": "node12-es6-module-support",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "main": "main.js",
  "type": "module",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node --no-warnings --experimental-modules --es-module-specifier-resolution=node main.js",
    "test": "jest ."
  },
}

Conclusion

There are several other things to consider, pros and cons, etc. In this post, I just wanted to create a minimal example of setting Node.js 12 to make use of its experimental ES6 modules support in a quick and simple way. This is the way I myself mostly use ES6 modules: basic and simple default and named export/import, and most importantly, without having to specify the file extension. So, here we have a simple example of how to achieve that with Node.js 12.

So long.