import.meta

The import.meta meta property is an Object that contains the following properties. It is only supported in ES modules.

This is the same as the path.dirname() of the import.meta.filename.

Caveat: only present on file: modules.

This is the same as the url.fileURLToPath() of the import.meta.url.

Caveat only local modules support this property. Modules not using the file: protocol will not provide it.

This is defined exactly the same as it is in browsers providing the URL of the current module file.

This enables useful patterns such as relative file loading:

import { readFileSync } from 'node:fs';
const buffer = readFileSync(new URL('./data.proto', import.meta.url));

Equivalent to require.main === module in CommonJS.

Analogous to Python's __name__ == "__main__".

export function foo() {
  return 'Hello, world';
}

function main() {
  const message = foo();
  console.log(message);
}

if (import.meta.main) main();
// `foo` can be imported from another module without possible side-effects from `main`

import.meta.resolve(specifier): string

import.meta.resolve is a module-relative resolution function scoped to each module, returning the URL string.

const dependencyAsset = import.meta.resolve('component-lib/asset.css');
// file:///app/node_modules/component-lib/asset.css
import.meta.resolve('./dep.js');
// file:///app/dep.js

All features of the Node.js module resolution are supported. Dependency resolutions are subject to the permitted exports resolutions within the package.

Caveats:

• This can result in synchronous file-system operations, which can impact performance similarly to require.resolve.
• This feature is not available within custom loaders (it would create a deadlock).

Non-standard API:

When using the --experimental-import-meta-resolve flag, that function accepts a second argument: