I’m currently rewriting a NodeJS project from a messy combination of CommonJS and Babel-transpiled ES Modules to be completely ES Module based.
In the process, I’ve become a bit confused by how Node handles these things. I’ve tried to read up on it, but I seem to be missing one final piece in my understanding.
I was assuming I would no longer need to use Babel to transpile the ES Modules. This seems to be correct. However, when I run my (Jest) tests, I still need to use the –experimental-vm-modules Node flag to make everything work.
My question is: what does that flag do? Reading the documentation, this seems to enable ES Modules, but didn’t I already enable ES Modules by specifying "type": "module" in the package.json file?
Relevant links:
- https://nodejs.org/api/esm.html#enabling
- https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#–experimental-vm-modules
- https://jestjs.io/docs/ecmascript-modules
>Solution :
Specifying type: "module" in package.json just telling library authors your source code is based on ESM.
For jest, you need to use experimental-vm-modules because the node api jest uses to enable ESM support is still not stable as of node 18.x
https://jestjs.io/docs/ecmascript-modules