How to browserify a standalone module for use in WebWorkers - node.js

Question

I am using browserify to create standalone modules that I can use in node.js and client side in browser. I don't use browserify on the entire app, just a few single node modules.
I do browserify-shim to shim e.g. lodash under the global var _.
This works very well except when using the modules inside webworkers.
The problem is:
When I shim lodash as _ the browserified code sets var _ = window._,
but windows is not defined inside the web workers.
My setup
I use grunt to browserify, and have browserify-shim configured in my package.json
map.js: (commonJS module, used directly in node.js)
var _ = require('lodash-node');
module.exports = _.map;
GruntFile.js:
// Browserify
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-browserify');
grunt.initConfig({
browserify: {
'map': {
options: {
bundleOptions: {
standalone: 'MapModule'
}
},
src: ['./map.js'],
dest: './output/map-module.js'
}
}
});
grunt.registerTask('default', [
'browserify'
]);
package.json:(partial)
{
"name": "APP NAME",
"version": "0.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": "app.js",
"browserify": {
"transform": [
"browserify-shim"
]
},
"browserify-shim": {
"lodash-node": "global:_"
},
}
The output
the generated output from browserify looks like this:
https://gist.github.com/mikaelhm/859735472c9b0038770e
Note line 2: var _ = (window._);
Thats a problem in a Web Worker.
Am I doing it all wrong, or is it only supposed to work in normal browsing mode?

Answer 1

I know this is an old post but I'm sharing the solution I found as this took me a few hours to find a solution.
I managed to get web workers running as modules using
https://github.com/substack/webworkify it's avaliable as via npm install webworkify.
A task I had to perform inside my web worker was to parse an xml string to javascript this I did with xmldoc, as xmldoc does not require a DOM and there is no DOM in web workers.
I include xmldoc in my web worker with require, which would be the same for lodash.