The original branch before the rebase is saved in my repo as installing_esm_nodes.2023.

Argh, the stupid update branch button has a default action to merge dev if you miss the drop down indicator on the side by a few pixels. Of course I intended to rebase. I'll fix it manually with a force push.

@knolleary

Can you please merge this pull request? It is 2026 and ESM is undeniably the future of javascript, and it has already been for a very, very, very long time. By not supporting nodes in ESM format node-red is preventing the world from progressing.

While ESM support slowly is adapted for require and this pull request perhaps is not strictly needed for V5, V4 supports node.js v18 which most certainly will not get support for that.

And even with the new esm support for require, merging this into V5 later will reduce version differences, and I would expect future undiscovered issues related to require(esm) to be much more probable than standard dynamic import which has been stable for years. But if you want this to stop in V4 and just rely on the behaviour of the runtime, that is a viable option. But for V4 this is an absolute must have functionality.

The branch is rebased to the latest V4 version and is now fully up to date. For testing you can use my lowercase ESM node. Or compile yourself from the wip/esm branch. The lowercase repo contains a full Cypress end to end test that installs the lowercase node and tests that it works. Update the run-node-red.sh to point to your node-red repo (with the installing_esm_nodes branch checked out and build).

I am also very much looking forward to this, hopefully it will get merged soon... 2.5 years and not much happened so far... :(

There is an issue with the code I'm afraid. It will not work on Windows because imports require a URL, not a file path. The correct way is:

const { pathToFileURL } = require('node:url');

// ....

// let importPromise = import(node.file);
const modulePath = pathToFileURL(node.file).href;
let importPromise = import(modulePath);

@TotallyInformation Thank you for reporting. I will look into that (although possibly not immediately the first few days).

The windows issue has been fixed for a while. On my node-red node in typescript repo I have set up automatic tests for full end-2-end tests with Cypress, installing and testing an esm node on a node-red instance build from the installing_esm_nodes branch.

For now the windows runner times out because concurrently fails to terminate the node-red instance and I have not spent a lot of time trying to fix it. But the e2e test itself succeeds:

[CYPRESS]   ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[CYPRESS]   │ ✔  upload_and_run.cy.ts                     01:08        1        1        -        -        - │
[CYPRESS]   └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[CYPRESS]     ✔  All specs passed!                        01:08        1        1        -        -        -  
[CYPRESS] 
[CYPRESS] wait-on http://localhost:1880 && npm run cy:run exited with code 0
--> Sending SIGTERM to other processes..
Error: The operation was canceled.

@TotallyInformation Do you want to be the author of the commit that fixes the import? It is basically identical with your comment.

@TotallyInformation Do you want to be the author of the commit that fixes the import? It is basically identical with your comment.

No, that's fine. Thanks for the offer though.

All commits pass after the latest rebase.

git test add -t test "npm ci && npm run test"
git test run -t test dev..installing_esm_nodes