error: Could not resolve "simple-exiftool"

[alexkli]

(First of all, awesome tool, great speed!)

Problem

I tried esbuild for our node applications, and it generally works. However, there seems to be an issue with simple-exiftool - as soon as it is required, it fails with the error:

../../../../../../../nui/esbuild-test/project/index.js:1:8: error: Could not resolve "simple-exiftool" (mark it as external to exclude it from the bundle)
require("simple-exiftool");
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 error

Steps to reproduce

Minimalist project to reproduce:

npm install -g esbuild

mkdir project
cd project

npm install simple-exiftool

echo 'require("simple-exiftool");' > index.js
esbuild --bundle index.js 

Will throw the above error.

Version

> esbuild --version
0.7.8

Same issue when using the Javascript API.

Notes

One hunch: the package.json of simple-exiftool has its main set to ./lib/exif. But it does not have that file, it only has a lib/index.js and also a trivial index.js in the root.

It works fine in our code, so maybe Nodejs' module loader is smart and falls back to index.js if the main from package.json can't be found. Possibly esbuild should do the same?

[alexkli]

The NodeJS module loader seems to work as I assumed. From the spec:

LOAD_AS_DIRECTORY(X)
1. If X/package.json is a file,
   a. Parse X/package.json, and look for "main" field.
   b. If "main" is a falsy value, GOTO 2.
   c. let M = X + (json main field)
   d. LOAD_AS_FILE(M)
   e. LOAD_INDEX(M)
   f. LOAD_INDEX(X) DEPRECATED
   g. THROW "not found"
2. LOAD_INDEX(X)

...
LOAD_INDEX(X)
1. If X/index.js is a file, load X/index.js as JavaScript text. STOP
2. If X/index.json is a file, parse X/index.json to a JavaScript object. STOP
3. If X/index.node is a file, load X/index.node as binary addon. STOP

Note step f. This will load index.js if the steps before did not find a file (with d being the normal file loading from main field).

[evanw]

Thanks for reporting this. It does indeed look like esbuild is not following the spec correctly. This will be fixed in the next release.

[alexkli]

Thanks, I can confirm the fix! Tested with 0.7.11.