link-module-alias

link-module-alias

Setup private modules within your repo to get away from error-prone typing of long relative paths like these:

require('../../../../some/very/deep/module')

Just create an alias and do it cleanly:

var module = require('@deep/module')
// Or ES6
import module from '@deep/module'

You can setup aliases both to individual files and to directories.

WARNING Use this module only in final applications. It will not work inside published npm packages.

Install

npm i --save-dev link-module-alias

Usage

Add your custom configuration to your package.json (in your application's root), and setup automatic initialization in your scripts section.

"scripts": {
  "postinstall": "link-module-alias"
},
// Aliases
"_moduleAliases": {
  "@root"      : ".", // Application's root
  "@deep"      : "src/some/very/deep/directory/or/file",
  "@my_module" : "lib/some-file.js",
  "something"  : "src/foo", // Or without @. Actually, it could be any string
}

If you encounter issues with installing modules, you may want to set up the preinstall script as well:

"scripts": {
  "postinstall": "link-module-alias",
  "preinstall": "command -v link-module-alias && link-module-alias clean || true"
}

How does it work?

• For aliases to directories, we create symlinks with fs.symlink
• For aliases to files, we create proxy modules with a package.json containing "main" that points to the target file

Background

This module it's almost a drop in replacement for another package https://www.npmjs.com/package/module-alias - use module module-alias if you like runtime require hooks and use link-module-alias if you want good compatibility with your IDE and no runtime hacks.

The key differentiator of link-module-alias is creating all the module links statically in form of symlinks and proxy packages inside node_modules, there is no hacky require hook and you don't need to load any supporting packages.

The key motivator to create link-module-alias was to fix the issue with module aliases not resolving in VS Code. https://github.com/ilearnio/module-alias/issues/19

License

MIT. Attribution to the module-alias for parts for the README and original idea.