runtime imports

[stephen-dahl]

Goals

1. import at runtime

Non-Goals

No response

Background

My company has multiple next frontends for different pages of our site. We put common code like the main nav and reusable components into a shared library. Currently we import this library as an npm module. This works but if we change something on the menu we then have to go through all our frontend projects and update the library version. I would like to deploy the shared library bundle to a cdn and load it at runtime so that it can be updated independently of all the micro-services that use it.

experimental urlImports allow us to import at build time. this helps but still requires me to rebuild all my micro services to see the updates.

I tried setting webpack.externalsPresets = { web: true } to not compile in any import that starts with https:// but received error

The target environment doesn't support dynamic import() syntax so it's not possible to use external type 'module' within a script

Import trace for requested module:
external ["http://localhost:3000/test.js"](http://localhost:3000/test.js)

Proposal

Rename urlImports to buildTimeImports. Add new runTimeImports also taking an array of url prefixes. These prefixes would be imported at runtime.