Getting RingoJS to look for required modules in the node_modules directory

Question

I'm trying to migrate a service from nodejs to ringojs. I've run into a problem with using require(). For example consider this:

var restify = require('restify');

RingoJS cannot find the restify module because it doesn't know to look in the node_modules directory. I can add node_modules to the path that RingoJS uses (and I did), but that doesn't help when restify calls require(), because the modules are nested in the directory tree.

Is there a way to get RingoJS to look for required modules in the node_modules directory?

Answer 1

You can add additional directories to Ringo's module search path with the -m option. Example: Install underscore via npm with npm install underscore and start ringo with ringo -m ./node_modules yourscript.js. Undersocre will be available and can be required as expected:

    const _ = require("underscore");
    // logs --> "3,6,9"
    console.log(_.map([1, 2, 3], function(num) {
       return num * 3;
    }));

Your specific problem seems to be that restify is only compatible with Node.js and not with other CommonJS-like platforms. It might have some sub-modules compatible with Ringo, but I haven't found any so far. Ringo's package.json is not 1:1 compatible with Node's / npm's package.json. If restify uses some Node-specific stuff in the package descriptor, Ringo cannot load these resources.

Ringo is still very close to ideas behind CommonJS with its various standardized modules, whereas Node has left this path a long time ago. You find CommonJS modules (which use require() to load a module) in Node, but not the different other APIs CommonJS tried to establish for server-side JavaScript.

Also, Ringo is not built around callbacks / an event-driven non-blocking I/O. You can use non-blocking I/O on Ringo, but you also can stick with blocking I/O. This is different with Node.js, where you have to develop in a non-blocking way and everything is optimized to run smooth with the event-driven model.