Now that Electron has hit Chrome's 60s we can have proper module support. But of course, the standard (for very good reasons) prevents loading modules from file:
and it makes sense for both Electron and NW.js to adhere to the statusquo.
So if you were really excited and this bums you, don't worry, you are in for awesome things.
The future Electron eco-system offers two options for native ES modules:
-
Custom Electron protocol via Chromium's module loading subsystem
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Custom NodeJS loaders via Node's module loading subsystem recommended
Both methods can coexist. In fact, so far from tests, it seems that at least for hybrid applications, using both methods together will be the more suitable path.
This focuses on the first.
Revision: Draft 2
After building Electron with the upgrade-to-chromium-66 branch I'm able to use native import on browser and renderer side.
After that import can be used in main.mjs (or renderer.mjs if you use it as a preload script).
No prefix needed in the import specifier, even for node_modules (think import fs from 'fs' or import _ from 'lodash'). Importing Electron itself does not work yet, but that's literally the only require I need.