ES Modules

[gr2m]

The plan

Migrate semantic-release and all the core plugins to native ES Modules.

The motivation

Node is moving to native ES Modules, so it's only a matter of time when we will be forced to do the same.

The 2nd reason is that a growing number of dependencies were or will soon be upgraded by ESM, and we are blocked from further updates, and have a ton of open pull requests which I'd love to get rid of.

semantic-release is in a good position to do the upgrade with comparably little friction, as it's often times run in it's own environment. It's not a production dependency.

Projects to update

I'll create dedicated issues for these shortly. We already started work on some of them.

• ES Module #2543
• ES Module commit-analyzer#296
• ES Module error#247
• ES Module github#418
• ES Module npm#436
• ES Module release-notes-generator#296
• ES Module env-ci#154

[fgreinacher]

@travi @gr2m I can take care of migrating the gitlab plugin, how far away do you think we are from completing the migrations already started? Did you notice any roadblocks so far?

[travi]

we have discovered a few roadblocks like semantic-release/commit-analyzer#297 (comment), which i haven't found the time to investigate very deeply yet.

our original plan was to update all the plugins consumed by core and core itself all at the same time so that they could be released together. at this point, i think i'm leaning toward updating core first since that will be the primary breaking change that will directly impact consumers. that way the plugins could be converted individually without much user impact since they are consumed by core that was already converted.

unfortunately, making progress on that has been blocked since getting a new M1 Macbook for myself since our test suite has some trouble running on that architecture. I've made some progress there that i still need to capture into an issue, but we may need some help from the community to remove that blocker.

once we get to the point where either core or core + the plugins that it directly consumes by default are converted, it would be great to get the gitlab plugin converted shortly after, so your help there is greatly appreciated.

[travi]

for folks following this effort, it is worth noting that this effort has been greatly slowed by #2478. if you are hoping to see this effort move forward sooner and you are able to help with #2478, we would greatly appreciate the help.

[pierluigilenoci]

@travi considering the impact this has, inquiring about a possible ETA is not a crime.
Especially when progress seems quite stalled.
I am aware that it is a voluntary project but this cannot be a justification for everything.
If the resources are not enough, the constructive solution is to ask for help.

[its-dibo]

really really waiting for this feature, I'm migrating all of my projects and packages into ESM, so I really need semantic-release to support ESM projects

great effort guys, keep going

[travi]

@its-dibo is there something in particular about the current state of semantic-release that you find to be holding up your progress? the core package has been converted to ESM already, but since semantic-release is normally leveraged through its own executable, the module type of semantic-release should not need to be coordinated with the module type of consuming projects.

[its-dibo]

I got this error @travi
v21

I removed all plugins and used the default config.
when removing the file release.config.js it worked

release.config.js

export default {};

info:
semantic-release: v21
node v18
package.type = "module"

[travi]

this effort is now complete for the core plugins (included as dependencies of the core package) 🎉

there are still official plugins beyond this list of core plugins that will still need to converted at some point, but they are beyond the scope of this initial effort. if folks would like to help us convert the remaining plugins, we would welcome that help.