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Specify namespace with url in ESM

Open
#948 8 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, nodejs
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by reviewing the proposed native ESM URL syntax and the package.json exports idea described in the issue. Determine whether namespace and optional color parameters belong in the library, then define the supported import forms and tests needed to show the behavior is complete.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

change-minor feature

When using native esm in Node, it's not possible anymore to use the pattern

const debug = require('debug')('namespace');

and we have to do

import createDebug from 'debug';
const debug = createDebug('namespace');

instead. In one of my projects, I've found myself to use an alternative approach though, where I do something like

import createDebug from 'debug';
const url = new URL(import.meta.url);
const [[namespace]] = url.searchParams;
export default createDebug(namespace);

so that it becomes possible to do stuff like

// In server
import debug from './debug.js?server';

// In worker
import debug from './debug.js?worker';

I was wondering whether it would be useful to have this functionality in the library itself. I'd be happy to clean my code up a bit and file a PR for this. An alternative approach would be to create my own npm module on top of the debug module if it's not desirable to have this in the library itself.

For the syntax, I was thinking about something like

import debug from 'debug/url?namespace'

where debug/url can become an exports in the package.json.

The url approach can be used to add more functionality as well, for example to force a specific color or something:

import createDebug from 'debug';
const url = new URL(import.meta.url);
const [namespace] = [...url.searchParams].find(([key, value]) => value === '');
const debug = createDebug(namespace);
const color = url.searchParams.get('color');
if (color !== null) {
  debug.color = color;
}
export default debug;

I'd love to hear some thoughts about this from the maintainers.

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
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Forks
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PR merge metrics
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  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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