Correct way to use Steal on Node?

[stucox]

I have some code I wrote to use client-side, but would like to reuse it on the server. It currently depends on my Steal config — specifically a YAML translate() plugin. In general it’d be nice if I could have my Steal config apply both on client & server.

My naive attempt to run my code on Node with Steal in control was:

// start-server.js
import steal from 'steal';
steal.startup({main: 'src/server'});

babel-node start-server.js

But my server-side code also includes modules which use Node builtins, which aren’t found.

I tried adding steal-builtins — but I realised that’s more designed to provide would-be-node modules in the browser — e.g. require('http') loads http-browserify, which realises it’s not running in a browser so throws a ‘no window object present’ error.

I saw that #749 brings these into core — but looks like it’s still using http-browserify, so I’d guess the same issue would arise?

[matthewp]

The canonical way would be:

var steal = require("steal");

steal.import("my-main").then( ...

steal.import will take care of making sure startup has been called.

As for your builtins issue, you might try using node-locate which should resolve to the Node's own builtins. This is an experimental module (intended for 1.1) so your results may vary, but it's worth a shot. Would be something like:

var steal = require("steal");
var nodeLocate = require("@stealjs/node-locate");

// This configures steal to use the extension
nodeLocate(steal.System);

steal.import("my/main").then( ...

[stucox]

Thanks for the response.

Results:

1. I had main: "src/client" in my package.json — with this, calling steal.import("src/server") in my server-side code still loads src/client.js, which isn’t what I want.
2. Removing main from package.json and explicitly calling steal.import("src/client") in my client-side code causes Steal to try and fetch an index.js file from the root of my repo — which didn’t exist. Added an empty index.js and now client-side just loads src/client.js and server-side just loads src/server.js, which is what I’m after (but feels dirty!)
3. Some paths are not being loaded correctly — e.g. I’m importing snabbdom-to-html, for which Steal correctly loads its src/index.js entry point, but the require('./init') call within that file rather than loading node_modules/snabbdom-to-html/src/init.js tries to load /init.js from the root of my project. Is this likely to be a bug in node-locate? If so I can raise an issue in that repo and discuss further / do my best to contribute.

[matthewp]

Thanks, 1&2 are bugs, with steal.import we shouldn't force the main to load first. Could you file a new issue for that here? If so I can probably fix it soon.

3 I'm not sure about, can you recreate it in the browser?

[stucox]

Re. 1&2: Done: #802

3: I’ll try and create a minimal case to reproduce it.

[stucox]

Ok, here’s a test case — not with the same lib, but it looks like it might be the same cause:

https://gist.github.com/stucox/889767b4677818fbcefe35c1138a781e

(reproduced in the browser without node-locate, so looks like this isn’t Node-specific, or a bug in node-locate, so feel free to rename this issue accordingly!)

[matthewp]

Thanks, will take a look.

[stucox]

Sorry about the silence — after a bit of absence, I tried the test case above with 0.16.38 and still the same result: Steal tries to request localhost:8080/es5-ext/array/%23/clear.js, when it should be localhost:8080/node_modules/es5-ext/array/%23/clear.js.

Have got as far as finding out it’s down to the path normalization — maybe it doesn’t deal with the /%23/ (i.e. /#/) too well? (which is a really weird thing to be in a path anyway). Although I don’t think the other case I found these sorts of issues with had any such weird paths.

Will report back when I have more.

[matthewp]

I was going to possibly take a look today.

[matthewp]

Moved this over to stealjs/steal-npm#192