require of _package.json_ complicates bundling

[thescientist13]

Hello! 👋

Was hoping to get your thoughts on an observation I had with a particular line in the project. Specifically where package.json is getting referenced via a require call.

exports.version = require('./package.json').version;

In the context of a project I am working on, a capability I am looking to achieve is being able to support running code in serverless environments, and so in those cases it is pretty common to bundle all the needed code into a "fat" lambda, so a single bundle.js artifact can be generated and uploaded to any cloud function service.

As this generally implies bundling of some sort to generate the single output file, the inclusion of a .json file complicates this a bit. I am using Rollup and so it requires a plugin / custom transform to convert the file into something Rollup can understand, like an ESM module.

function jsonLoader() {
  return {
    name: 'json-loader',
    async load(id) {
      const extension = id.split('.').pop();

      if (extension === 'json') {
        const url = new URL(`file://${id}`);
        const json = JSON.parse(await fs.promises.readFile(url, 'utf-8'));
        const contents = `export default ${JSON.stringify(json)}`;

        return contents;
      }
    }
  };
}

I can see from the code the value of bundling this to get a reference to the version from package.json. Would the project be open to alternate ways to handle this? Maybe something like below?

# Node >= 18 w/ ESM
import packageJson from './package.json' assert { type: 'json' };

# Node < 18
const packageJson = JSON.parse(await fs.promises.readFile('./package.json'));

exports.version = packageJson.version;

Thanks in advance for any consideration on this, and thank you so much for all the great work on this project! 🙌

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This may also be helpful to (or solved by?) related efforts and requests like #345 or #397 ?