Pattern for sharing a library between angularjs and node.js

Question

How can I share a library between angularjs and node.js?

For example an angularjs service is often a reusable piece of code. Let's take a URL library as an example (pick apart and construct URLs).

The same library should be usable in node.js.

My constraint is that I want to share the library code, but I do not want to restrict myself to any loader library on the browser side. So if I need to use RequireJS in the browser, I need to disable any loading part so that can be controlled elsewhere.

So how do I share code?

Answer 1

What you'll see in a lot of different places that support multiple environments is wrapping the entire returned value from your 'service' into a parameter passed to an initialization function from a closure. The one catch to keep in mind with angular is that service probably shouldn't have other dependencies to remain environment agnostic (If this was a simple utility file for example, there would not likely be conflict).

As an example consider:

(function( myService){

  if (typeof module !== 'undefined' && module.exports ) {
    module.exports = myService;
  } else if( angular ){
    angular.module('yourModule', [])
    .factory('serviceNameHere', function(){ return myService; });
  } else {
    window.myService = myService;
  }

}(function(){
  function foo(){/* Do something */}
  function bar(){/* Do something else */}

  return {
    foo: foo,
    bar: bar
  }
}()))

You could still have dependencies if desired via nodes require syntax, or angular's dependency injection, but the service would likely need modification as it moved from one project to another.