branneman

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions

Rich-Harris

Edit — February 2019

This gist had a far larger impact than I imagined it would, and apparently people are still finding it, so a quick update:

• TC39 is currently moving forward with a slightly different version of TLA, referred to as 'variant B', in which a module with TLA doesn't block sibling execution. This vastly reduces the danger of parallelizable work happening in serial and thereby delaying startup, which was the concern that motivated me to write this gist
• In the wild, we're seeing (async main(){...}()) as a substitute for TLA. This completely eliminates the blocking problem (yay!) but it's less powerful, and harder to statically analyse (boo). In other words the lack of TLA is causing real problems
• Therefore, a version of TLA that solves the original issue is a valuable addition to the language, and I'm in full support of the current proposal, which you can read here.

I'll leave the rest of this document unedited, for archaeological