Node.js document is not defined

Question

Why node.js does not recognize document.GetElementById? It says 'ReferenceError: document is not defined'. What can I do?

ReferenceError: document is not defined at Object.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Desktop\main.js:9:18) at Module._compile (module.js:460:26) at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:478:10) at Module.load (module.js:355:32) at Function.Module._load (module.js:310:12) at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:501:10) at startup (node.js:129:16) at node.js:814:3 

Answer 1

document relates to the DOM (Document Object Model) in a web browser.

Node.js, however, is not a browser environment. It is a server environment, much like PHP or Perl, and as such, you can’t access the browser’s DOM or do anything specific to browser-hosted JavaScript.

The closest you could get is using something like browserify to include Node.js modules in your client-side code.

Answer 2

You could use JSDom to add Dom support to Node. To make a variable global you can use either

GLOBAL.document = new JSDOM(html).window.document; 

or

global.document = new JSDOM(html).window.document; 

where html is your website as a string.

To use JSDom include it in your project with:

const jsdom = require("jsdom"); const { JSDOM } = jsdom; 

or in plain js with:

var jsdom = require("jsdom"); var JSDOM = jsdom.JSDOM; 

I hope this is answering your question.