In current Node.js, specifiers starting with https:// are unsupported. The loader below registers hooks to enable rudimentary support for such specifiers. While this may seem like a significant improvement to Node.js core functionality, there are substantial downsides to actually using this loader: performance is much slower than loading files from disk, there is no caching, and there is no security.

    1. // https-loader.mjs
    2. import { get } from 'https';
    4. export function resolve(specifier, context, defaultResolve) {
    5.   const { parentURL = null } = context;
    7.   // Normally Node.js would error on specifiers starting with 'https://', so
    8.   // this hook intercepts them and converts them into absolute URLs to be
    9.   // passed along to the later hooks below.
    10.   if (specifier.startsWith('https://')) {
    11.     return {
    12.       url: specifier
    13.     };
    14.   } else if (parentURL && parentURL.startsWith('https://')) {
    15.     return {
    16.       url: new URL(specifier, parentURL).href
    17.     };
    18.   }
    20.   // Let Node.js handle all other specifiers.
    21.   return defaultResolve(specifier, context, defaultResolve);
    22. }
    24. export function getFormat(url, context, defaultGetFormat) {
    25.   // This loader assumes all network-provided JavaScript is ES module code.
    26.   if (url.startsWith('https://')) {
    27.     return {
    28.       format: 'module'
    29.     };
    30.   }
    32.   // Let Node.js handle all other URLs.
    33.   return defaultGetFormat(url, context, defaultGetFormat);
    34. }
    36. export function getSource(url, context, defaultGetSource) {
    37.   // For JavaScript to be loaded over the network, we need to fetch and
    38.   // return it.
    39.   if (url.startsWith('https://')) {
    40.     return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    41.       get(url, (res) => {
    42.         let data = '';
    43.         res.on('data', (chunk) => data += chunk);
    44.         res.on('end', () => resolve({ source: data }));
    45.       }).on('error', (err) => reject(err));
    46.     });
    47.   }
    49.   // Let Node.js handle all other URLs.
    50.   return defaultGetSource(url, context, defaultGetSource);
    51. }
    1. // main.mjs
    2. import { VERSION } from 'https://coffeescript.org/browser-compiler-modern/coffeescript.js';
    4. console.log(VERSION);

    With the preceding loader, running node --experimental-loader ./https-loader.mjs ./main.mjs prints the current version of CoffeeScript per the module at the URL in main.mjs.