Can Stimulus be used as an ES Module without a build system?

1

To use Stimulus without a build system, the handbook mentions adding a HTML script tag pointing at a UMD JavaScript file on unpkg.

Is (or could) Stimulus be provided such that it can be imported directly in ES6 code without using a build system?

import { Application, Controller } from "https://somecdn.com/x/stimulus.esm.js"

i.e. the module name mentioned in ES6 code is a real, full URL, as opposed to "stimulus" which requires a build system to resolve at compile-time.

1 Like
2

That would be awesome.
From the very little I know about ES6 module native support in browser, it works very well when there isn’t too many dependencies, which I assume is the case of Stimulus!

1 Like
3

It should be possible but you would need to manually build a table somewhere of where Stimulus can import controllers from, as normally this table is built from globbing the require context in application.js

1 Like
4

Regarding native browser support for ES Module dependencies…

When looking at this example, I noticed that the unpkg JavaScript CDN supports adding ?module to a script tag’s src value, resulting in module names in that script (and in its dependencies, recursively) being automatically rewritten to full URLs.

5

You can use Stimulus as an ES Mosule with cdn.skypack.dev;
import { Application } from “https://cdn.skypack.dev/stimulus”;
To ease further, it would be great if Stimulus would be distributed not only as UMD but also as ESM.