Is it possible to import third-party libraries in extensions?

[flexagoon (Pavel Zolotarevskiy)]

I’m trying to create a GNOME extension for https://activitywatch.net, and for that I need to import their library (GitHub - ActivityWatch/aw-client-js: Client library for ActivityWatch in JavaScript). Is it possible to do that from a GNOME extension? If I just add the library as a git submodule, I can’t import it, neither via the GJS imports object or via JavaScript import. How can I use the library in my extension?

[jfrancis (Jason Francis)]

See this reply, it may be of interest:

MQTT module for gjs?

Is it possible for a gjs app to somehow use modules normally distributed through npm? Yes with a bit of effort depending on what you are trying to use. If it’s a pure ES module and doesn’t depend on anything extraneous to gjs - you can import it as is from node_modules. If it depends on globals that gjs doesn’t support, you will need to polyfill them. For example setTimeout, atob, websocket, fetch … I did some (minimal) work there in GitHub - sonnyp/troll: Makes GNOME JavaScript cozy. - che…

[flexagoon (Pavel Zolotarevskiy)]

Can you help me with this? I tried the following rollup.config.mjs:

import commonjs from "@rollup/plugin-commonjs";
import { nodeResolve } from "@rollup/plugin-node-resolve";
import json from "@rollup/plugin-json";
import nodePolyfills from 'rollup-plugin-node-polyfills';

export default {
    input: 'node_modules/aw-client/out/aw-client.js',
    output: {
        file: 'activitywatch.js',
    },
    plugins: [
        nodeResolve(),
        commonjs(),
        json(),
        nodePolyfills(),
    ],
};

But I got an error saying something like “export declarations can only be at the top level of a module”

[andyholmes]

You may want to read through the documentation for GJS’s ES Module support. Note that using ESM in a GNOME Shell extension may not work, as GNOME Shell has not yet been migrated from the import system we started using before ESM existed.

A very small number of people have done this, but you will be mixing two types of import systems.