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Overview

The @loaders.gl/polyfills module installs support for Node.js. This module should be imported before you call any loaders.gl functionality under Node.js

loaders.gl is based on the HTML5 API provided by modern, evergreen browsers.

Installation​

npm install @loaders.gl/polyfills

Usage​

Just import @loaders.gl/polyfills before you start using other loaders.gl modules.

import '@loaders.gl/polyfills';
import '@loaders.gl/core';

Features​

The polyfills module installs the following capabilities.

  • fetching files from Node file system
  • Node Filesystem implementation
  • Node ReadableFile and WritableFile implementations
  • Node Crypto class
  • Node Stream support
  • Node library loading
  • Image parsing and encoding under Node.js |

Deprecated polyfills​

Before Node v18, fetch needed to be polyfilled. The @loaders.gl/polyfills module still conditionally installs a fetch polyfill on Node 16, but this is expected to be removed in next major release.

fetch Polyfill​

The Node.js fetch, Response and Headers polyfills supports a large subset of the browser fetch API, including:

  • Response.text(), Response.arrayBuffer(), Response.json()
  • Response.body stream
  • headers, status, statusText etc.
  • data uri / base64 decoding
  • automatic gzip, brotli and deflate decompression support for responses with content-encoding headers.
  • Files ending with .gz are automatically decompressed with gzip decompression (this is only done on Node.js, in the browser the content-encoding header must be set).

The Node.js fetch is able to follow 30X redirect: if Response has status 300-399 and location header is set, the fetch polyfill re-requests data from location.

Remarks​

  • The polyfills module can safely be imported in the browser. It is designed to be a no-op in this case, though if you are using new cutting-edge bundlers, they may not respect this configuration.

Attribution​

  • The Header polyfill (for Node.js fetch) is a fork of the implementation in https://github.com/github/fetch (MIT license).
  • The Blob and File polyfills are forks of @gozala's web-blob and web-file modules respectively, under MIT license.