Webpack Aliases in Node JS Server code - node.js

Question

I'm building an isomorphic React/React-Router/Redux/Webpack application and I'm attempting to implement server side rendering.
My directory looks like:
/client
/actions
/components
/containers
/server
/server.js
In my webpack config, I have aliases set up for all the folders inside client:
var path_base = path.resolve(__dirname, '..');
const resolve = path.resolve;
const base = function() {
var args = [path_base];
args.push.apply(args, arguments);
return resolve.apply(resolve,args);
};
const resolve_alias = base.bind(null, 'src/client');
const aliases = [
'actions',
'components',
'constants',
'containers',
'middleware',
'reducers',
'routes',
'store',
'styles',
'utils',
'validation'
];
so that inside the code that gets bundled by webpack, I can do:
import { Widget } from 'components';
and that import gets resolved by webpack.
Now in my server code, in order to do the rendering, I have to import some of my client files, like routes/index.js. The problem I'm running into when I import my routes file, it's using a webpack alias to another file, say components or containers so naturally, the node js require system can't resolve it.
How do I fix something like that? I looked at this question and it talks about essentially setting up the same aliases that exist in webpack with mock-require. But then the issue becomes that my routes file imports all my components which then all import things like stylesheets, images, etc. Should I then be using something like webpack-isomorphic-tools?
The guides I've been looking at (this for example) are all great at showing how server side rendering is accomplished but none of them really talk about how to resolve all the requires and whatnot.

Answer 1

After battling with this issue for 2 days I settled on babel-plugin-webpack-alias.
What you need to do to resolve paths with that is:
$ npm install --save-dev babel-plugin-webpack-alias
Add the plugin to your .babelrc
Add the aliases to your webpack.config (make sure you use path.join())
Refer to this post if you have problems loading styles
The other option I tried was universal-webpack but I found it to be a bit verbose. If you want to see roughly how the whole server-side loading works, you can check out this video.

Answer 2

If you really want them, run your server side code through babel and use this plugin: https://www.npmjs.com/package/babel-plugin-module-alias which will let you do the same thing as webpack.
Edit: This one works a lot better: https://github.com/jagrem/babel-resolve-relative-module it allows multiple paths

Answer 3

Try to use NODE_PATH. Node will always look for a module in this path during require calls. It allows to short cut your relative paths as you want.
// turn this
import {Widget} from '../../components';
// into this
import {Widget} from 'components';
See Node.js docs for more information.
P.S. this thing is very sensitive, so use it carefully. Now your code tightly depends from the environment and may break somewhere.

Answer 4

If you use webpack-isomorphic-tools then it'll take your webpack config into account for your server side which will make all your aliases work.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-isomorphic-tools