Help with writing Inngest http action - dynamic Node require
Hi there,
A user of our community asked about a Convex adapter for Inngest and when building it, it failed with the following error:
I attempted to:
* Modify the Inngest source to add
"use node" and it didn't work
* Add "use node" in my convex/inngest.js http action file
* Add "node": { "externalPackages": ["inngest"] } to my convex.json file
None of the above worked, but I also saw something about Convex not supporting dynamic requires or imports at all. Is there a way to work around this or perhaps detect it in the Inngest package source code so it gracefully doesn't support this functionality?
Sources:
* Inngest source code for this import - It uses import in the source, but when transpiled for npm, it uses a require as seen in the error above.
Thanks!GitHub
inngest-js/packages/inngest/src/components/execution/als.ts at bf8a...
The developer platform for easily building reliable workflows with zero infrastructure for TypeScript & JavaScript - inngest/inngest-js
9 Replies
Thanks for posting in <#1088161997662724167>.
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Thank you!
Hey @Dan @ Inngest, thanks for helping the customer debug! Do you have a repro by chance or could you point me to a good inngest starter?
Hey @ballingt - thanks for following up - here's the demo repo I just pushed: https://github.com/inngest/inngest-convex-test
GitHub
GitHub - inngest/inngest-convex-test
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The
inngest.ts code should work, but I wasn't able to test the httpAction due to the error.
After installing the deps, I manually edited my node_modules to test the "use node" directive to see if that worked if we added it to our actual package code.I'll play with this and try to hook something up, something not clear here is that httpAction()s can't be defined in a "use node" file, if you need HTTP you'll have to make due with the generated HTTP API that every convex query, mutation, or action receives; or write the httpAction in a non-"use node" file and call
await ctx.runAction(api.inngest.something, args); to invoke the defined in a "use node" file
As written, the non-"use node" convex/http.ts file is importing the "use node" convex/inngest.ts, and there's no bundler funny business to help out here by turning this into RPC or something, that's a real import, so the inngest imports also end up in the convex/http.ts entry point
If you want to use "use node" for some reason, here's an approach: https://github.com/inngest/inngest-convex-test/pull/1
Unfortunately streaming isn't going to work across the Convex JS runtime / Node.js JS runtime boundary, so ideally we could support Inngest running in the convex js runtime like you were trying to do initially.
So we're bundling with esbuild, not marking node imports as external because we want them to fail the build since normally they're a mistake.
One approach is hiding the import from esbuild, when I make change to packages/inngest/src/components/execution/als.ts it works with convex:
None of the above worked, but I also saw something about Convex not supporting dynamic requires or imports at all. Is there a way to work around this or perhaps detect it in the Inngest package source code so it gracefully doesn't support this functionality?Yeah queries and mutations don't support dynamic imports in Convex, but actions do, it's just that these dynamic imports aren't making it through the series of bundlers; in this case convex invokes esbuild to bundle the inngest code which is a dynamic require (edit: as you point out in the thread title) rather than import in inngest bundle: https://app.unpkg.com/inngest@3.39.2/files/components/execution/als.js#L60-61 but this result is the same, esbuild is happy to try to bundle
require("node:async_hooks") too@Dan @ Inngest I posted https://github.com/inngest/inngest-js/pull/1020
GitHub
obscure "node:async_hooks" import from bundlers by thomasballinger ...
Summary
Obscure the dynamic import of an optional Node.js dependency to prevent bundlers from attempting to inline the code.
By preserving the intended runtime behavior this makes code bundled for ...
Hey @ballingt - I've been trying to test this PR change with my convex project and keep running into this issue:
I already ran
nvm use 18 and that's installed, so I don't know what's failing here.
Update - I think I solved it!
Ok - now I still get this error:
It's working now!Working fully - thanks Tom! https://github.com/inngest/inngest-convex-test
GitHub
GitHub - inngest/inngest-convex-test
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@Dan @ Inngest beautiful, that's great, thanks for persevering! If you remember what you hit let us know, would love to make sure the self-hosting instructions are getting love.