Node.js require() vs RequireJS?

Question

Hello with RequireJS I can set a base path like this: base : './app/' so when I am in ./app/foo/bar/ for example and I have a script where I use require('foo'); RequireJS then would search for ./app/foo.js and not in node_module folder or in ./app/foo/bar/foo.js this comes handy when you have a kind of structure where it would be much cleaner for you as a developer to see the dependencies instead of having ../../foo.js. I could have ./app/foo.js and ./app/foo/foo.js and ./app/foo/bar/foo.js it would be much more cleaner to have:

require('foo');
require('foo/foo');
require('foo/bar/foo');

rather than:

require('../../foo');
require('../foo');
require('./foo');

Now you could say why not change the name and not have foo everywhere, let's say that we can't for any reason…

Another lack of feature that I see in node's require method against RequireJS is the ability of setting path mapping, if I have a directory named ./app/super-sized-directory-name/ in RequireJS I could simply do 'big-dir' : 'super-sized-directory-name' and then I could simply use require('./app/big-dir/foo') with Node.js's require method this is not possible as far as I know…

Answer 1

--alias, -a    Register an alias with a colon separator: "to:from"
             Example: --alias 'jquery:jquery-browserify'   

You can register aliases with browserify, so that covers your renaming.

As for your rooted absolute paths, that can't really be done. As mentioned modul8 has a namespacing mechanism to solve this.

I would recommend you pong SubStack in #stackvm on freenode and ask him directly.