Support ESM in NodeJS environments

[fubhy]

Describe the Feature

Hi.

Are there any plans to update the build configuration to support ESM in NodeJS environments? It currently incorrectly assumes that ESM is always within a browser context and therefore fails to leverage the native crypto package. This is an issue for pretty much every project that builds and runs their code base with esbuild based tools like tsup or tsx as well as vite (yes, vite can also be used in a NodeJS environment!), etc.

While debugging this, I combed through the current rollup based build configuration in ethers.js and think it's possible to seamlessly upgrade it to tsup while also properly declaring the relevant package.json fields (hopefully explicitly declaring exports), adding support for ESM in NodeJs environments while maintaing the current behavior for browser environments.

Let me know if you'd be open to exploring this. I think ethers.js would greatly benefit from dedusting the build config a bit :-)

Code Example

No response

[tmm]

Running into an error related to this for wagmi. When using vitest (vite under the hood), the ethers/lib/utils entrypoint isn't accessible .

Error: Cannot find module '/Users/tom/Code/wagmi/packages/core/node_modules/ethers/lib/utils' imported from /Users/tom/Code/wagmi/packages/core/dist/connectors/mock/index.js
Did you mean to import ethers@5.6.9/node_modules/ethers/lib/utils.js?
 ❯ new NodeError internal/errors.js:322:7
 ❯ finalizeResolution internal/modules/esm/resolve.js:318:11
 ❯ moduleResolve internal/modules/esm/resolve.js:776:10
 ❯ Loader.defaultResolve [as _resolve] internal/modules/esm/resolve.js:887:11
 ❯ Loader.resolve internal/modules/esm/loader.js:89:40
 ❯ Loader.getModuleJob internal/modules/esm/loader.js:242:28
 ❯ ModuleWrap.<anonymous> internal/modules/esm/module_job.js:76:40
 ❯ link internal/modules/esm/module_job.js:75:36

---

Can workaround this by changing code from:

import { getAddress } from 'ethers/lib/utils'
getAddress(...)

To:

import { utils } from 'ethers'
utils.getAddress(...)

But using utils pulls in a lot more code than it needs to.

[vpavlin]

Hi, I am relatively new to dependency management in Node, but is there a way for me to fix this? I am trying to use wagmi with web3auth and I am hitting this error because of how wagmi connector depends on ethers v5.

I manually modified the file in node_modules to see if it fixes it - it does, just had to do one additional import change, but that does not feel like the right way to do it for production.

And suggestions are appreciated!

[ricmoo]

This will not be added to v5 (the build process is very complex) as I am trying to focus on my time on v6, which provides ESM for node.