enable-browser-mode

Enable browser mode

The goal of this package is to work as a quick-and-dirty one-liner that will allow Node to import and otherwise execute traditional browser code without throwing errors. It also sets the global object to window, and aims to simulate the browser as realistically as possible.

/* [CommonJS] */
require('enable-browser-mode');

- or -

/* [ES6] */
import 'enable-browser-mode'

No variable assignment required, just call it! You can then require browser JS with:

include('./jquery.min.js');

Which will evaluate that script in the global context. (Make sure the scripts supplied to window.include() are trusted.)

Example

Won't work:

console.log(document.createElement('a'));

>   ReferenceError: document is not defined

Works like a charm:

require('enable-browser-mode');
console.log(document.createElement('a'));

>   HTMLAnchorElement {Symbol(impl): HTMLAnchorElementImpl}

Use cases

The specific need for this functionality came from the web-widgets package, which generates widget trees using DOM operations like document.createElement(). The Node runtime cannot build out this widget tree by default, as it does not have access to the window and document variables, so it throws a ReferenceError.

By importing this package (which depends on JSDOM), we can expose the window and document globals to the whole project, meaning we can write all of our browser-optimized (and DOM-heavy) code in a file like browser.js, but still use that same code for server-side rendering in Node with require('browser.js').

In Node, web-widgets builds out the widget tree on the virtual DOM and then exports it as flat HTML using the Node.outerHTML property, and in the browser, the DOM is manipulated directly on-the-fly (i.e. with Node.appendChild). With enable-browser-window, all that is needed to reuse the original browser library is creating an separate JS file for Node, importing this package, and then importing your browser code:

require('enable-browser-mode');
require('browser.js');
myBrowserObject.doBrowserStuff(); 

// code like you're in the browser =)