deno2node

deno2node

tsc replacement for transpiling Deno libraries to run on Node.js. Essentially a thin wrapper around tsc to work on Deno code.

Quick Setup

If you don't already have a package.json, you may find dnt easier to use.

Run npx deno2node --init in an empty directory.

CLI Usage From Node.js

First, install deno2node.

npm install --save-dev deno2node

Next, run it with npx:

npx deno2node

It is useful to put deno2node in a prepare script. You can configure this by running the following command.

npm set-script prepare deno2node

You can now simply run

npm run prepare

to run deno2node. In addition, this will be executed automatically when you run npm install.

CLI Usage From Deno

deno2node is actually a Deno project that compiles itself to run on Node.js. (This is a great way to test the tool, too.)

deno run --no-prompt --allow-read=. --allow-write=. \
  https://deno.land/x/deno2node/src/cli.ts

How It Works

There are three main steps to this.

1. Transform the code base in-memory, by rewriting all import statements.
2. Typecheck the code.
3. Emit .js and .d.ts files. These files can directly be run by Node or published on npm.

deno2node uses ts-morph under the hood, which in turn builds on top of the TypeScript compiler tsc. Hence, you get the same behaviour as if you had developed your code directly for Node.

deno2node can perform more powerful transpilation steps that make it flexible enough for most needs.

Shimming

Some things are global in Deno, but not in Node.js. One example for this is fetch. Consequently, you need to shim them, i.e. provide code that supplements the missing globals.

Note that deno2node does not actually touch global definitions. Instead, it only injects import statements in the respective modules.

Install the packages providing the shims.

Now, create a file that exports the globals you need:

// @filename: src/shim.node.ts
export { Blob } from "buffer";
export { webcrypto as crypto } from "crypto";

export { fetch, File, FormData, Headers, Request, Response } from "undici";
export { Deno } from "@deno/shim-deno";
export { alert, confirm, prompt } from "@deno/shim-prompts";

Lastly, you need to register your shims in tsconfig.json so deno2node can inject them for you:

// @filename: tsconfig.json
{
  "deno2node": {
    "shim": "src/shim.node.ts" // path to shim file, relative to tsconfig
  }
}

Runtime-specific code

In same cases you may want to have two different implementations, depending on whether you're running on Deno or on Node. When shimming is not enough, you can provide a Node-specific <anything>.node.ts and a Deno-specific <anything>.deno.ts version of any file. They need to reside next to each other in the same directory.

deno2node will ignore the Deno version and rewrite imports to use the Node.js version instead. Thus, the Deno-specific file will not be part of the build output.

For example, provide greet.deno.ts for Deno:

// @filename: src/greet.deno.ts
export function greet() {
  console.log("Hello Deno!");
  // access Deno-specific APIs here
}

Now, provide greet.node.ts for Node:

// @filename: src/greet.node.ts
export function greet() {
  console.log("Hello Node!");
  // access Node-specific APIs here
}

Finally, use it in foo.ts:

import { greet } from "./platform.deno.ts";

// Prints "Hello Deno!" on Deno,
// and "Hello Node!" on Node:
greet();

This technique has many uses. deno2node itself uses it to import from https://deno.land/x. The Telegram bot framework grammY uses it to abstract away platform-specific APIs.

Vendoring

To import a module which has no npm equivalent, first set up vendorDir.

// @filename: tsconfig.json
{
  "deno2node": {
    "vendorDir": "src/vendor/" // path within `rootDir`
  }
}

Then, populate it: deno vendor src/deps.vendor.ts --output src/vendor/.

Vendoring is still experimental, so be welcome to open an issue if you encounter a problem with it!

Also, consider recommending pnpm to users of your library. It might be able to deduplicate vendored files across packages.

API

Confer the automatically generated API Reference if you want to use deno2node from code.

Versioning

Similar to tsc, new features or TypeScript upgrades may alter output or diagnostics of the CLI across minor versions. While this usually does not break anything, you may still want to pin the minor version, hence only allowing patch updates. You can do this by adding a ~ prefix to the version in your package.json file.

npm install --save-dev --save-prefix='~' deno2node