Avoiding long relative paths when doing imports in Node.js

Aren’t you tired of doing something like this import AnyModel from '../../../models/AnyModel' ?

Well, if you are not tired like me, you can skip this post and I envy you haha.

But if you are tired like me, imagine that your directory structure is something like this:

myProjectFolder/
|--main.js
|--app/
    |--models/
    |  |--Article.js
    |  |--Post.js
    |--workers/
       |--SomeWorker.js

So if you want to use Article.js inside SomeWorker.js, you will need to do import Article from '../models/Article.js'. I hate those '..', they annoy me, and that import doesn’t have many '..', but if the loaction of SomeWorker.js or any file where you need to include Article.js is far far away the number of '..' is greater.

So yesterday, I was searching for a solution and I came across with app-module-path-node, thanks a lot @Pat.

An awsome module that free you of the relative paths. You only need to:

1. npm install app-module-path --save
2. In your main.js, app.js or whatever.js add import 'app-module-path/register';

Now instead of import Article from '../models/Article.js' I can do import Article from 'app/models/Article.js' and I am very much happier than before!!

If you know another solution, please post it in the responses and I will update the post!

hope you enjoy reading this post, as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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Mariano Matayoshi (matayoshi.mariano@gmail.com)