esmoduleserve

This is a shim HTTP server for directly running ES6 modules with non-precise import targets in your browser (without a bundling step).

It acts as a regular file server for a given directory, but exposes an extra top-level path, /_m/, to serve rewritten modules relative to that directory. Any file requested through this path will have its imports (and re-exports) rewritten to point at precise resolved scripts paths, referenced through /_m/.

Resolution is done via the node algorithm, but letting "module" or "jsnext" fields in package.json take precedence over "main".

If some of the dependencies you load through this don't provide ES module files, you are likely to find an error about a missing import on your devtools console.

You can specify module files from parent directories of the served directory using /__ to stand in for /.. in a /_m/ path. By default, to avoid accidentally serving things you don't want to expose, this is only allowed one parent directory deep.

Usage

You run the server for a given directory...

esmoduleserve demo/ --port 8080

It will start up an HTTP server on the given port, serving the content of the demo directory statically. If there's a module called demo.js in this directory, you can load it in an HTML file with a script tag like this:

<script type="module" src="/_m/demo.js"></script>

The options recognized by the command-line server are:

• --port to specify a TCP port to listen on. Defaults to 8080.

• --host to specify a hostname to listen on. Defaults to "localhost".

• --depth to specify how many parent directories should be accessible. Defaults to 1.

• --prefix to specify an alternative URL prefix for module script URLs. Defaults to "_m".

The moduleserver.js file exports this functionality as HTTP middleware. Usage looks something like:

const {ModuleServer} = require("esmoduleserve/moduleserver")
const moduleServer = new ModuleServer({root: "/some/path",
                                       maxDepth: 2,
                                       prefix: "_m"})

// In a server function
if (moduleServer.handleRequest(req, resp)) return

The handleRequest method handles only requests whose path starts with the prefix. It returns true for such requests.

Source

This code is open-source under an MIT license. If you want to contribute, create pull requests on GitHub.