I have a react, vite project that is in typescript and of “type: module”, however, I need to call a one-of-a-kind file that is built with “require” syntax rather than “import”. I can’t update it so I have to get the two working together and I’ve been unable to.

I’ve built a “wrapper.js” file that contains the following code to try and convert the older format to the import format for use:

const {getProduct, getProducts} = require("../../../server/productInfo");
export {getProduct, getProducts};

But with the above code, I get the error:

ReferenceError: require is not defined

So, following internet solutions I added this at the top of the file:

import { createRequire } from "module"; // "node:module"
const require = createRequire(import.meta.url);

But that give’s me this new error:

SyntaxError: The requested module '/node_modules/.vite/deps/module.js?v=21b36cad' does not provide an export named 'createRequire'

So, then I tried importing module as default, but that seemed to be null

import module from "module";
console.log(module) // null

I then tried to polyfill it like below.

// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import { nodePolyfills } from 'vite-plugin-node-polyfills'
import pkg from './package.json' assert { type: 'json' }
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc'

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    nodePolyfills(),
    react({ plugins: [['@swc/plugin-styled-components', {}]] }),
  ],
  define: {
    APP_VERSION: `"${pkg.version}"`,
    APP_TITLE: `"${pkg.displayName}"`
  },
  build: {
    outDir: '../server/frontend/dist',
  },
})

But I’m unsure how to use it. Because if I do the below, I still get a “require is not defined” error.

import { createRequire } from "module";
const require = createRequire(import.meta.url);

Does anyone know what I’m missing or if I’m making a syntax mistake?

FYI, my tsconfig.json looks like this:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "lib": ["DOM", "DOM.Iterable", "ESNext"],
    "module": "ESNext", //"CommonJS",
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "outDir": "../server/frontend/dist",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "allowImportingTsExtensions": true,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "noEmit": true,
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
    "allowJs": true,
    "checkJs": false,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": true,
    "typeRoots": ["./node_modules/@types", "./src/types"],
    "types": ["vite/client", "node"]
  },
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "**/node_modules/*",
    "**/dist/*",
  ],
  "ts-node": {
    "swc": true,
    "esm": true,
    "compilerOptions": {
      "module": "ESNext" //"CommonJS"
    }
  }
}