no window object present webpack nodejs

Question

I'm using webpack with babel to compile my ecmascript 6 code. Everything works fine but if I add certain dependeciens like the requests npm package. Here are my files:

main.js

import os from 'os'

export class User {

  constructor(username) {
    this.username = username;
  }

  register() {
    console.log("registering...");
  }
}

var client = new User("hey")


console.log(user.register());

webpack config:

var webpack = require('webpack')

module.exports = {
  entry: [
    './src/main.js'
  ],
  output: {
    path: "dist",
    publicPath: "/dist/",
    filename: "stela.js"
  },
  watch: false,
  module: {
    loaders: [{
      test: /\.js$/,
      // excluding some local linked packages.
      // for normal use cases only node_modules is needed.
      exclude: /node_modules/,
      loader: 'babel'
    }, {
      test: /\.json$/,
      loader: 'json-loader'
    }]
  },
  externals: {
    fs: '{}',
    tls: '{}',
    net: '{}',
    console: '{}'
  },
  babel: {
    presets: ['es2015'],
    plugins: ['transform-runtime']
  },
  resolve: {
    modulesDirectories: ['node_modules']
  }
}

Now if I run webpack and then run node dist/stella.js everything works fine it logs out registering...; however, if I add certain dependencies like the requests npm package:

...
import request from 'request'
...

I run webpack everything compiles down with no errors but then I try running node dist/stella.js and I get this error:

throw new Error('no window object present');

Answer 1

By default, Webpack is set up to target the browser, not a Node environment. Try setting target in your config:

module.exports = {
    // ...
    target: "node",
    // ...
}