I've noticed that every time I want to use a package in Node I need to "npm install" it locally and then use the require keyword. I wanted to know if there's a way I could include a remote library kind of like that way we can include remote files using client side html when we use a CDN:
<head>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>
require() in node core is synchronous, so there is no way to do it natively (since network i/o is async in node). You'd have to write some function to fetch the resource first and then require() it.
You can't actually supply a URL to "require", but you can of course fetch a remote resource from a URL, including a javascript resource. And then load it locally.
The following answer even links to a "remote_require" that someone wrote to do another kludgy version of this.
If you are trying to use other JavaScript files in your application, you will need to export all of the functions defined by those JavaScript files.
You would export a function like so:
exports.nameOfExport = function(x, y, z) {
// Function content
};
You would then require this file in the file you are trying to use it in with this line:
var myFileName = require('./routes/folder1/myFileName'); // Relative path to required file
If this doesn't answer your question, I suggest going to https://www.npmjs.org/ to search for a package that does what you are trying to do.
