Node js linter that follows requires - node.js

There are many tools to lint node.js files, but I can't seem to find one that would recursively go through require's. Ex -
var otherModule = require('./otherModule.js');
console.log(otherModule.func1());
Is there an app that can raise an error if func1 is not defined in otherModule?

Typically you do not want a linter to follow requires since you do not control the source of modules you have not written yourself.
Focus on linting your own code, both at the top level index.js and any included libraries of your own design ./lib.
UPDATED
I know of no tool that guarantees you are not misusing a module by calling functions or methods it does not provide. It is up to the programmer to assure that she abides by the module's contract.

Related

What Modern Ways (If Any) Does Node Have to "Override" It's Import System?

In Node you can make an importText function fairly easily, and then use it in another file like so:
import importText from 'importText'
const css = await importText('./someFile.css')
// (This isn't technically possible yet, but top-level await is coming someday)
By using Webpack or a similar tool, you can also do the same thing, only with a more convenient syntax:
import css from './someFile.css';
Node used to have a way to do the same thing without Webpack, but the API for it, "require extensions", was deprecated (emphasis added):
Deprecated. In the past, this list has been used to load non-JavaScript modules into Node.js by compiling them on-demand. However, in practice, there are much better ways to do this, such as loading modules via some other Node.js program, or compiling them to JavaScript ahead of time.
https://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#modules_require_extensions
My question is: what are the "much better ways"?
They mention "compiling them to JavaScript ahead of time", which I would assume is the Webpack approach. But how would one "load a module via some other Node.js program" ... or solve the problem any other way (the text I quoted implied those two weren't the only options)?

In Flow NPM packages, what's the proper way to suppress issues so user apps don't see errors?

If you use something like $FlowIssue it's not guaranteed to be in everyone's .flowconfig file. If you declare a library interface, that seems to only work for the given project, not in other projects that import your package (even if you provide the .flowconfig and interface files in your NPM package).
Here's the code I'm trying to suppress errors for in apps that use my package:
// $FlowIssue
const isSSRTest = process.env.NODE_ENV === 'test' // $FlowIssue
&& typeof CONFIG !== 'undefined' && CONFIG.isSSR
CONFIG is a global that exists when tests are run by Jest.
I previously had an interface declaration for CONFIG, but that wasn't honored in user applications--perhaps I'm missing a mechanism to make that work?? With this solution, at least there is a good chance that user's have the $FlowIssue suppression comment. It's still not good enough though.
What's the idiomatic solution here for packages built with Flow?
Declaring a global variable
This is the way to declare a global variable:
declare var CONFIG: any;. Instead of any you could/should use the actual type.
Error Suppression
With flow v0.33 they introduced this change:
suppress_comment now defaults to matching // $FlowFixMe if there are
no suppress_comments listed in a .flowconfig
This means that there is a greater chance of your error being suppressed if you use $FlowFixMe.
Differences in .flowconfig between your library and your consumers' code are a real issue, and there is no way to make it so that your code can be dropped into any other project and be sure it will typecheck. On top of that, even if you have identical .flowconfigs, you may be running different versions of Flow. Your code may typecheck in one version, but not in another, so it may be the case that consumers of your library will be pinned to a specific version of Flow if they want to avoid getting errors reported from your library.
Worse, if one library type checks only in one version of Flow, and another type checks only in another version, there may be no version of Flow that a consumer can choose in order to avoid errors.
The only way to solve this generally is to write library definition files and publish them to flow-typed. Unfortunately, this is currently a manual process because there is not yet any tooling that can take a project and generate library definitions for it. In the mean time, simply copying your source files to have the .js.flow extension before publishing will work in some cases, but it is not a general solution.
See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/43852211/901387

How can I include additional modules in a NodeJS custom binary?

I am building a custom binary of NodeJS from the latest code base for an embedded system. I have a couple modules that I would like to ship as standard with the binary - or even run a custom script the is compiled into the binary and can be invoked through a command line option.
So two questions:
1) I vaguely remember that node allowed to include custom modules during build time but I went through the latest 5.9.0 configure script and I can't see anything related - or maybe I am missing it.
2) Did someone already do something similar? If yes, what were the best practices you came up with?
I am not looking for something like Electron or other binary bundlers but actually building into the node binary.
Thanks,
Andy
So I guess I figure it out much faster that I thought.
For anyone else, you can add any NPM module to it and just add the actual source files to the node.gyp configuration file.
Compile it and run the custom binary. It's all in there now.
> var cmu = require("cmu");
undefined
> cmu
{ version: [Function] }
> cmu.version()
'It worked!'
> `
After studying this for quite a while, I have to say that the flyandi's answer is not quite true. You cannot add any NPM module just by adding it to the node.gyp.
You can only add pure JavaScript modules this way. To be able to embed a C++ module (I deliberately don't use the word "native", because that one is quite ambiguous in nodeJS terminology - just look at the sources).
To summarize this:
To embed a JS module to your custom nodejs, just add it in the library_files section of the node.gyp file. Also note that it should be placed within the lib folder, otherwise you'll have troubles requiring the module. That's because the name/path listed in node.gyp / library_files is used to encode the id of the module in the node_javascript.cc intermediate file which is then used when searching for the built-in modules.
To embed a native module is much more difficult. The best way I have found so far is to build the module as a static library instead of dynamic, which for cmake(-js) based module you can achieve by changing the SHARED parameter to STATIC like this:
add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} STATIC ${SRC})
instead of:
add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} SHARED ${SRC})
And also changing the suffix:
set_target_properties(
${PROJECT_NAME}
PROPERTIES
PREFIX ""
SUFFIX ".lib") /* instead of .node */
Then you can link it from node.gyp by adding this section:
'link_settings': {
'libraries' : [
"path/to/my/library.lib",
#...add other static dependencies
],
},
(how to do this with node-gyp based project should be quite ease to google)
This allows you to build the module, but you won't be able to require it, because require() function in node can only be used to load built-in JS modules, external JS modules or external dynamic node modules. But now we have a built-in C++ module. Well, lot of node integrated modules are C++, but they always have a JS wrapper in /lib, and those wrappers they use process.binding() to load the C++ module. That is, process.binding() is sort of a require() function for integrated C++ modules.
That said, we also need to call require.binding() instead of require to load our integrated module. To be able to do that, we have to make our module "built-in" first.
We can do that by replacing
NODE_MODULE(mymodule, InitAll)
int the module definition with
NODE_BUILTIN_MODULE_CONTEXT_AWARE(mymodule, InitAll)
which will register it as internal module and from now on we can process.binding() it.
Note that NODE_BUILTIN_MODULE_CONTEXT_AWARE is not defined in node.h as NODE_MODULE but in node_internals.h so you either have to include that one, or copy the macro definition over to your cpp file (the first one is of course better because the nodejs API tends to change quite often...).
The last thing we need to do is to list our newly integrated module among the others so that the node knows to initialize them (that is include them within the list of modules used when searching for the modules loaded with process.binding()). In node_internals.h there is this macro:
#define NODE_BUILTIN_STANDARD_MODULES(V) \
V(async_wrap) \
V(buffer) \
V(cares_wrap) \
...
So just add the your module to the list the same way as the others V(mymodule).
I might have forgotten some step, so ask in the comments if you think I have missed something.
If you wonder why would anyone even want to do this... You can come up with several reasons, but here's one most important to me: Those package managers used to pack your project within one executable (like pkg or nexe) work only with node-gyp based modules. If you, like me, need to use cmake based module, the final executable won't work...

bower init - difference between amd, es6, globals and node

I am creating my first Bower component. After running bower init the script asks me 'what types of modules does this package expose?' with these options:
amd
es6
globals
node
what is the difference between these options?
If you don't know, it's quite likely globals is the right answer for you.
Either way, you need to understand:
what is and why AMD
what is a nodejs module
what is ecmascript 6 and especially es6 modules
[UPDATE]
This feature was introduced very recently in bower and is not documented at all yet (AFAIK). It essentially describes the moduleType, which states for what module technology the package is meant to be consumed (see above).
Right now, It doesn't have any effect apart from setting the moduleType property in the bower.json file of the package.
See https://github.com/bower/bower/pull/934 for the original pull-request.
[UPDATE #2]
A few additional points, to answer comments:
right now AFAIK there is no validation done on the moduleType property - which means that people are technically allowed to use whatever value they want for it, including angularjs if they feel inclined to do so
the bower committee seems to not be keen toward the inclusion of additional non-interoperable/proprietary moduleTypes (think composer, angular, etc) - which is easily understandable, but yet again, nothing really prevents people from using the moduleType value they want
an exception to the previous is the (somewhat) recent inclusion of the yui moduleType, so, there are "exceptions" to be made, assuming they are part of a concerted plan
What I would do if I were to author a package for a not-listed package manager and publish it on bower?
I would author an es6 module, and use / patch es6-transpiler to output the package format I need. Then I would either/and:
petition the bower guys to include my package technology as a choice (based on the fact it's supported by es6-transpiler as a target)
publish my package including both the es6 module version of it and the transpiled XXX version of it, and use es6 as a moduleType
Disclaimer: I don't have real-life experience authoring angularjs modules.
Initial
I'm using bower init for first time too.
The options should refer to the different ways to modularize some JavaScript code:
amd: using AMD define, like requirejs.
node: using Node.js require.
globals: using JavaScript module pattern to expose a global variable (like window.JQuery).
es6: using upcoming EcmaScript6 module feature.
In my case I wrote a Node.js module dflow but I'm using browserify to create a dist/dflow.js file that exports a global dflow var: so I selected globals.
Other Updates
The command I used to browserify dflow as a window global object was
browserify -s dflow -e index.js -o dist/dflow.js
I changed it cause I prefer to use require also inside the browser, so now I am using
browserify -r ./index.js:dflow -o dist/dflow.js
and so I changed the bower.moduleType to node in my bower.json file.
The main motivation was that if my module name has a dash, for example my project flow-view, I need to camelize the global name in flowView.
This new approach has two other benefits:
Node and browser interface are the same. Using require on both client side and server side, let me write only once the code examples, and reuse them easily on both contexts.
I use npm scripts and so, I can take advantage of ${npm_package_name} variable and write once the script I use to browserify.
This is another topic, but, it is really worth that you consider how it is useful the latter benefit: let me share the npm.scripts.browserify attribute I use in my package.json
"browserify": "browserify -r ./index.js:${npm_package_name} -o dist/${npm_package_name}.js"
Just for reference, this is precisely what bower specifies regarding the module types:
The type of module defined in the main JavaScript file. Can be one or an array of the following strings:
globals: JavaScript module that adds to global namespace, using window.namespace or this.namespace syntax
amd: JavaScript module compatible with AMD, like RequireJS, using define() syntax
node: JavaScript module compatible with node and CommonJS using module.exports syntax
es6: JavaScript module compatible with ECMAScript 6 modules, using export and import syntax
yui: JavaScript module compatible with YUI Modules, using YUI.add() syntax
Relevant link: https://github.com/bower/spec/blob/master/json.md#moduletype

Node.js/npm - dynamic service discovery in packages

I was wondering whether Node.js/npm include any kind of exension mechanism comparable to Python setuptools' "entry points".
So, in short:
is there any way I can do dynamic discovery of services provided by other packages using npm?
if not, what would be the best way to implement something similar? Specifying the extension name in the main module's configuration file seems to be the logical solution, but I wonder whether something "automatic" can be done.
I'm not aware of any builtin mechanism to do this.
One viable way of doing it yourself:
I made a small tool (Jumpstart) to quickly create project scaffolding from templates with placeholders, and I used a kind of plugin mechanism for that. It basically comes down to that the Jumpstart script searches for modules named jumpstart-* "adjacent" to where the module itself is installed. So it would work for both local and global installations. If installed locally, it would search the other local modules (on the same level) and if global, it searches the other global modules.
Note that here, "search" comes down to a simple fs.exists check to see if there's a Jumpstart template module with a particular name installed. However, nothing would stand in the way to actually get a full list of all installed packages matching the jumpstart-* pattern, and loading all at once. I could also search up the entire directory tree for node_modules directories and do the same. There's no point in doing this for this particular program, however.
See https://npmjs.org/package/jumpstart for docs.
The only limitation to this technique is that all modules must be named in a consistent fashion. Start with some string, end with some string, something like that. Any rogue packages polluting the namespace could be detected by doing further checks on a package contents: What files does it contain? What kind of object does its main module export? etc.
Brunch also uses a plugin mechanism. This one actually deals with file extensions, so is more relevant: https://github.com/brunch/brunch/wiki/Plugins . See for example source of the CoffeeScript plugin https://github.com/brunch/coffee-script-brunch/blob/master/src/index.coffee .

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