Npm

Jscore can work seaminglessly with packages from node_modules/ with the help of esbuild. This feature not exclusive to npm. It works perfectly fine with pnpm or yarn because all of them use the same node_modules/ directory.

Directly trying to use a package similar to how you would in node wouldn't work in jscore. To use a package in jscore, you need to prefix esbuild: to the name of the package. This tells jscore to use esbuild to quickly convert the package into a standalone JavaScript file which it can easily load.

Example:

Here is an example on how to use lodash.

import lodash from 'esbuild:lodash';

const arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
console.log(lodash.chunk(arr, 2));
console.log(lodash.sum(arr));

Note:

Make sure that esbuild is installed before using this feature.

Technical Details

The packages that are bundled by esbuild are stored in the .cache/jscore directory to avoid bundling every time ewwii reloads jscore, which happens very frequently. Once in a while, its a good idea to clear the cache directory and let jscore repopulate it.

Packages that use node exclusive features like node:fs cannot be loaded by jscore. Although this limitation can be solved either by stubbing or redirecting to a simpler API, we decided keep it this way because no one will really needs node exclusive packages to build simple widgets.