[turborepo] Codegenerator not support ESM

[peam1146]

What version of Turborepo are you using?

v1.10.9

What package manager are you using / does the bug impact?

Yarn v2/v3 (node_modules linker only)

What operating system are you using?

Mac

Describe the Bug

Unexpected error. Please report it as a bug:
Must use import to load ES Module: /Users/peam/work/softnetics/<app>/turbo/generators/config.ts
require() of ES modules is not supported.
require() of /Users/peam/work/softnetics/<app>/turbo/generators/config.ts from /Users/peam/.npm/_npx/111d46748c4e70c7/node_modules/node-plop/lib/node-plop.js is an ES module file as it is a .ts file whose nearest parent package.json contains "type": "module" which defines all .ts files in that package scope as ES modules.
Instead change the requiring code to use import(), or remove "type": "module" from /Users/peam/work/softnetics/<app>/package.json.

I got this error when use "type: 'module'" in package.json

Expected Behavior

It should work ...

To Reproduce

use "type: 'module'" in package.json

Reproduction Repo

No response

[peam1146]

It works when I use .cjs with jsDoc instead

[tknickman]

This is a known limitation at the moment, we're working to provide full support for ESM dependencies in the future!

[allejo]

It works when I use .cjs with jsDoc instead

Simply to expand on what @peam1146 mentioned with an example.

Go from this,

import type { PlopTypes } from '@turbo/gen';

export default function generator(plop: PlopTypes.NodePlopAPI): void {
  // ...
}

to this,

/** @param plop {import('@turbo/gen').PlopTypes.NodePlopAPI} */
module.exports = (plop) => {
   // ...
};

And everyone's happy.

[Nilegfx]

I think this is an important feature as it blocks us from having code generation in type: module packages. even if we tried the suggested workaround in @allejo comment above, we still have to change all import statements down the flow to CJS imports too. this is very annoying issue.

[wesleycoder]

I was digging into this issue and found out that adding a package.json with "type": "commonjs" to turbo/generators is enough to resolve this issue, so I filed the PR above.

While this is not merged if anyone stumbles into this you can create the file by hand, including on already existent templates without the need to convert the config.ts or config.js to commonjs format.

#typesafety_ftw

[umar-ahmed]

@tknickman @wesleycoder While this works to let you run the generator file, it doesn't fix the original issue that generators don't support ESM.

So if I import an ESM package into one of my generators, it will still complain about require() of ESM module. I think we should re-open this issue OR I can file a new issue if that's preferable

[paolostyle]

Why is this issue closed? My entire codebase is in ESM format and this silly workaround with package.json is not a solution. At the very least this should work with a config.cts/config.cjs file.

[wesleycoder]

AFAIK the support for ESM should come from the underlying plopjs/plop package and turborepo has no way of supporting this on it's own.
Consider opening an issue there if this continues to impede your use-case/workflow.

[paolostyle]

I ended up using plop directly. Turborepo is using version 0.26.0 of node-plop (latest is 0.32.0, due to semver it's stuck at 0.26.0 despite the ^) which I presume does not support ESM, but the latest versions of plop packages are ESM-based. I tried overriding the version of node-plop through pnpm.overrides but that didn't help either. I don't see much value in using Turbo's wrapper anyway.

[umar-ahmed]

latest is 0.32.0, due to semver it's stuck at 0.26.0 despite the ^

@paolostyle Caret behaves differently for 0.x.y version ranges. It will never upgrade past 0.26.x

@wesleycoder are there any plans to upgrade the version of Plop within Turborepo? I think it might resolve the issues that people like me are having with the way turbo gen handles ESM files 🙏

[paolostyle]

I know how it behaves, that's what I meant by "stuck" and "due to semver", but I suppose I didn't express my thoughts properly, sorry about that.