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Comment by a13n | Hacker News Reader

Was curious if author considers node libs like `http` a dependency and the answer is no they don't. Looks like they're defining a dependency as an npm module, which seems pretty fair.

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(author here) Anything that's available to you, without configuration, after installing nodejs and starting the application. That includes the whole NodeJS standard library and maybe standard (or extremely common) utilities available on the server (curl, git, ls, find, sed, etc).

I still have to find a way to store data and I really don't want to create my own database, but I haven't found a database in the standard library.

This is analogous to Go. The interface for databases is in the std lib, but that actual implementation of that interface is not. If you want to use Postgres in Go, you have to pick a non-std package (or write your own).

I'd consider this an acceptable import ;)

Std is not a dependency.

Your comment got me curious if it’s at all possible to build a Node web service without importing any Node modules (ie with just the global/module-local namespace). Glancing at the globals docs, I think you’d be limited to WASM, binary extensions (like N-API), or maaaaaaybe doing something horrifically hacky with CJS require.

If you’re OK importing node’s internal modules [0], which I believe are loaded anyway, you could achieve a lot, though it definitely wouldn’t be worth it.

No developer is an island. [1]

[0] https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/main/lib/internal

[1] https://youtu.be/TY9xsT6S75A?si=uqPUuxKNl_1vqMhm

You can also use HTTP ESM imports which is how I like to build dependencies for my personal projects. In Node I think you still need a special loader for this, in Deno, this is a native feature.

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