How do I ignore a an import in webpack? - node.js

Question

I have a webpack file that looks like the one below, and I have a line in my handler.ts which looks like this:
import { PayoutEntity, IPayout, payoutEntityManager } from "/opt/nodejs/orm";
However I get the following error as the module/path for "/opt/nodejs/orm" doesn't exist locally:
Module not found: Error: Can't resolve '/opt/nodejs/orm'
The webpack build is for a lambda and the files for "/opt/nodejs/orm" are in a lambda layer that will only be accessable from the application once it's deployed to aws.
So in fact I would like webpack to ignore completely /opt/nodejs/orm and not even try to pack it.
I've tried using the ignore plugin with const ignore = new webpack.IgnorePlugin({resourceRegExp:/^(\/opt\/nodejs\/search|\/opt\/nodejs\/orm|\/opt\/nodejs\/put-event)$/}) but this just results in baking the "module not found" error into the bundled output file.
"use strict";
const path = require("path");
module.exports = {
devtool: "source-map",
entry: "./src/handler.ts",
mode: "production",
target: "node",
externals: [nodeExternals()],
node: {
__dirname: true,
},
output: {
filename: "index.js",
libraryTarget: "commonjs2",
path: path.resolve(__dirname, ".build"),
},
module: {
rules: [
{
test: /\.(graphql|gql)$/,
loader: "graphql-tag/loader",
exclude: /node_modules/,
},
{
test: /\.(tsx?)$/,
loader: "ts-loader",
exclude: [
[
path.resolve(__dirname, "node_modules"),
path.resolve(__dirname, ".serverless"),
path.resolve(__dirname, ".webpack")
],
],
options: {
transpileOnly: false,
experimentalWatchApi: true,
},
},
],
},
resolve: {
extensions: [".ts", ".tsx", ".js"],
},
};