Enhancement or Bug: Handling of 'electron/*' process-specific module aliases

[undergroundwires]

Describe the bug

Hi @alex8088, thank you again for the project, everything has been painless so far. Your efforts are appreciated to keep it up to speed with latest changes in ecosystem (vite, ESM etc.).

I have an idea for improvement (or maybe a bug depends on how we look at it).

While importing from electron directly works fine (e.g., import { app } from 'electron'), I've noticed that alias imports like electron/main, electron/common (which is considered best practice as it scopes the import to the right process), such as import { app } from 'electron/main' does not work.

Error:

[vite]: Rollup failed to resolve import "electron/main" from ".../privacy.sexy/src/infrastructure/CodeRunner/System/NodeElectronSystemOperations.ts".
This is most likely unintended because it can break your application at runtime.
If you do want to externalize this module explicitly add it to
`build.rollupOptions.external`

Currently, I can work around this issue by explicitly including 'electron/main' in the plugin configuration:

plugins: [externalizeDepsPlugin({
      include: ['electron/main', 'electron/common', 'electron/renderer'],
    })],

Or I can do that using using resolve.alias:

resolve: {
      alias: {
        'electron/main': 'electron',
        'electron/common': 'electron',
        'electron/renderer': 'electron',
      },
    },

Using resolve.alias is better because it also works in non-electron builds for example when building unit tests.

Would it be beneficial to provide this config through electron-vite somehow? Part of externalizeDepsPlugin or something similar configuration that can be shared across electron.vite.config.ts and unit tests.

It's probably nice-to-have but it will have good impact on developer experience.

Electron-Vite Version

1.0.28

Electron Version

27.0.0

Vite Version

4.4.11

Validations

• Follow the Code of Conduct.
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.

[alex8088]

Hi, @undergroundwires, Thx. This is a bug, Electron's export subpaths also need to be externalized. I'll fix it soon.

[alex8088]

electron-vite 2.0 is out! 🎉, fixed